# How I set up a Next.js project structure

> Learn how I organize a Next.js project beyond pages and public, with a components folder, a lib folder for utilities, and jsconfig.json absolute imports.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2021-08-12 | Topics: [Next.js](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/next/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/nextjs-project-structure/

[Next.js](https://flaviocopes.com/nextjs/) is great to give our [React](https://flaviocopes.com/react/) apps a big set of built-in features that are essential in Web applications.

It gives us just a little bit of structure for our project files.

All visible pages stay under the `/pages` folder.
API routes stay under the `/pages/api` folder.
Publicly visible files under `/public`.

That's basically all. The rest is all on us.

What I commonly do is this.

All the React components required by pages are in a `/components` folder.

I usually have a `/components/Common` folder, and then I re-create the pages structure:

- `/components/Common`
- `/components/Home`
- `/components/Profile`

... and so on.

Then I have a `lib` folder that contains all the utilities used by the React components or the API routes. It might be data fetching, a library initialization, the [Prisma](https://flaviocopes.com/prisma/) setup, database access, a fetcher for SWR, the `easy-peasy` store.. basically anything that could be reused anywhere but it's not a component.

I also make sure that I can include them like this:

```js
import comp from components/Common/comp
import x from lib/x
```

using this little setup in `jsconfig.json`:

```json
{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "baseUrl": "."
  }
}
```

I mentioned Prisma, which I use frequently. That'd need its own `/prisma` folder for the schema and the migrations, and maybe an SQLite database if needed.

If the site has content, in form of markdown for example, I'll add a `/content` folder.

For middleware (sometimes it's useful), `/middleware` but it's quite rare.

This will work fine for almost all the things you'll need.