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Learn React 19: The Complete Guide to Modern Web Apps

Feature-Based Folder Structures

As React applications grow, organizing code by feature rather than by file type enhances maintainability. A feature-based architecture groups related components, hooks, and utilities into self-contained modules, promoting clear ownership and reducing hidden dependencies. This structure facilitates independent feature evolution, simplifies refactoring, and supports cleaner public interfaces. Best practices include protecting boundaries between features, co-locating state management, avoiding oversized features, and using an index.js for stable imports. Overall, this approach streamlines development and enhances team agility by allowing easy navigation and management of features.

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As React applications scale, codebases organized by file type rather than by feature become harder to maintain. A type-based structure spreads related logic across multiple folders, which complicates refactoring and introduces hidden dependencies that only surface at scale. Many React projects start with a structure that groups files by type. For example, a common structure looks like this:

src/
    ├── components/   # All buttons, cards, forms go here
    ├── pages/        # All top-level page components
    ├── hooks/        # All custom hooks
    └── services/     # All API calls, utility functions
Traditional react application

Type-based structure pitfalls

This approach introduces the following challenges when code is organized by file type rather than by feature:

  • Difficulty scaling: In a large app, modifying the “User Profile” feature requires jumping between components/UserProfileCard.js, pages/UserProfilePage.js, and hooks/useFetchProfile.js.

  • Poor cohesion: Files related to a single feature are scattered, making it hard to quickly understand the feature’s complete logic.

  • Refactoring risk: Deleting or refactoring a feature involves manually searching for all related files across multiple top-level directories.

Feature-first architecture

A feature-first architecture solves these problems by grouping each domain, such as Auth, Tasks, or User Profile, into a self-contained unit with its own components, hooks, and API utilities, allowing teams to work independently and confidently. Instead of placing components, hooks, and utilities in separate top-level directories, each feature encapsulates them internally, making ownership clear and helping eliminate accidental cross-feature imports. Large teams benefit from this structure because it transforms each feature into a portable, maintainable module with its own logic, UI, and state, while exposing only the public APIs defined in its index.js ...