NodeJS files and directories names convention

Context

Across the ecosystem, we can find all sort of files and directories naming conventions in NodeJS projects.

That has caused misalignment, shifting the focus away from more important matters, also have created conventions that introduce problems such:

• Disagreement around the English language, making it even more difficult for the non-English speaker to figure out the right decision.
• Case sensitive vs. case insensitive file systems, causing issues in different environments such as your local computer vs. CI/CD computers.
• Format mismatching around separating English words.

The camelCase, and/or PascalCase for naming convention, although this seems the right solution, there are some caveats.

What happens for the following cases httpClient.ts vs. HTTPClient.ts vs. HttpClient.ts?

• Which one is the more appropriate choice here without getting into disagreement and use the phrase "it depends"?

In some cases, the file PascalCase is used if the file is a class or a React component, otherwise follow camelCase is used.

• What happens when the file contains more than a class or a React component? How do we take the appropriate decision about it without getting into disagreement and use the phrase "it depends"?

Also, does that means that if we refactor the code and we move the React component out of a file, that file name must change?

That would introduce more potential refactoring like renaming file paths, adding more unnecessary lines of code changes and extra work in code reviews.

As well as issues in CI environments, where it may be the case that git didn't rename the file due to case-insensitive file systems, and you must use git mv [old file] [new file] to fix such issue.

Resolution

File or directory names:

• MUST NOT contain any leading or trailing spaces
• MUST be lowercase i.e., no uppercase or mixed case names are allowed
• MUST separate what constitutes an English word by -
• MUST NOT contain any of the following characters: ~)('!*
• MUST NOT start with . or _