Search for a command to run...
I'm a life-long, self-directed learner with a love for libraries, documentation, and all things tech.
Currently serving the people at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh 📚 Formerly @ Codédex 👾 and Codecademy 🧑🏻💻
Extracurriculars (in no particular order): 🧑🏻🍳 Cooking 📖 Reading (mostly non-fic of all kinds) 🎸 Listening to/playing music 🎙️ Enjoying awesome podcasts. 🏃🏻 Running, walking, moving in general! :D
Thanks for reading!
No comments yet. Be the first to comment.
It's been a while... Hello! It's been a long time since I last published a blog post here. 2022 was an interesting year for me. A few of the highlights include: Moving back to my hometown in Pittsburgh, PA Helping bring in new contributors for Code...
Hello, #DEVCommunity! My name is Brandon and I'm a Content Contributor from the Free Team at Codecademy. For the past few months, we've collaborated in a company-wide effort and delved into the world of user-generated content (UGC) as it relates to c...
Is this the Description?
New Job! New Drive! New Ideas!
The Gatsby CLI Part of what makes Gatsby a powerful frontend framework is its list of builtin commands via the Gatsby CLI tool . Commands such as gatsby new and gatsby build allow for a smooth experience with development and deployment, respectively...
No matter what language(s) you might be using right now, you're going to need to understand how to organize your project's file structure and navigate it. These structures are composed of folders (directories) that can hold a combination of files and other folders that may lead to other files and other folders, etc.
Knowing how to navigate your project's folder structure becomes more essential as they grow in size and complexity. Your files sometimes need to be able to import certain methods and libraries in order for your project to work as expected.
For this post, I'll be using Javascript.
In order to work with the files and folders in a given project, you need to establish a working directory so that you can work directory with your projects files and folders.
Most operating systems have a root directory, which is the origin or parent directory of all other directories. They can be found in the absolute path. The root directory for Windows is C:\. MacOS is /.
One of the direct descendants of the root directory is the home directory which contains the names one or more users for a given machine. Those users each have a desktop which itself contains a combo of files and folders.
If you have a project folder called book-finder-app (and it's saved to the Desktop), you'd want to change the working directory to that folder.
cd Desktop/book-finder-app
Say we created a new folder named projects, saved it to the Desktop, and then moved book-finder-app to the projects folder. The path to the book-finder-finder-app would look like this:
cd Desktop/projects/book-finder-app
When set up this way, we can no longer go straight from the Desktop to the book finder app. We have to travel through the project directory to get to the book-finder-app.
There are different ways of defining the path to a given directory
The absolute path is essentially the full path that leads to the working directory, usually starting from a place like C:\ or /Users/, depending on which operating system you're using.
Here is a helpful visualization of an absolute path in tree-form (including the root directory):
Here's what the absolute path to a project looks like on MacOS:
/Users/user/Desktop/projects/weather-app
The relative path is written in the context that the "root directory" is whatever is the current, or working, directory.
The relative path uses a dot-notation (. and ..) refer either to a file in the current directory or a directory one level outside the current directory.
For example, if my current working directory is weather-app, then
This example was inspired by this wonderful article on freeCodeCamp's news section and made this diagram to better visualize what a folder structure actually looks like.
I'm going to use a simple analogy of a book-bag to illustrate how a file system would work.
Assuming /bookbag is the current working directory, we have two subdirectories: /pencilBox and /binder. Let's change directories and work from the science notebook in /noteBooks:
cd binder/notebooks/science
Assuming some of my science notes pertain to physics and I need to use some function to solve a problem. However, the function I need belongs in the notes in the /math notebook. Since our working directory is now /bookBag/binder/notesBooks/science, we could import the function from the /math notebook's notes.js using the relative path:
import thisFunction from '../math/notes.js'
Now we're able to use a function from another directory in our current working directory. Pretty cool!
When I first started learning to program, I avoided the terminal and command line like the plague. After all, it's just a screen with text and that's it. But while it may seem mundane, knowing just a bit about how your operating system's file system works will take you far in the pursuit of becoming a great developer.
[Explain computer files, folders, and directories (video)] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUW5MEKDtMM)
Files and Directories (documentation)
File Directories Explained by Getting Dressed in the Morning (article)