The Secret to Maintainable Remix Apps: Hexagonal Architecture

Ever feel like updating your Remix app's UI is a circus act? One small change, and suddenly everything's breaking? You're not alone. This fragility often comes from tightly coupled components – a change in one place triggers a domino effect throughout your code.

But there's a solution: hexagonal architecture. This pattern, also known as ports and adapters, helps you build Remix apps that are flexible, maintainable, and resilient to change. How? By clearly separating your core business logic from the nitty-gritty details of UI components, databases, and external services.

Hexagonal architecture is usually depicted using a similar image to the one above[1]. In the center, we have application code. This is where your business logic lives. A well-structured application will use Domain-driven design to model and build a software system that matches the business problem. In hexagonal architecture, this DDD-inspired system lives within the application core, where it can focus on implementing business logic without having to deal with the idiosyncrasies of outside systems or dependencies.

Surrounding the application core is a solid hexagon-shaped border called "ports." The application core communicates with external systems by passing messages or value objects across the ports. Despite the name, the six-sided shape isn't inherently meaningful[2]. What's important is that ports are simply interfaces acting as a boundary between the core and the adapters. The interfaces exposed by ports should match the domain model of your application core and encapsulate implementation details of the external systems.

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