Convention Over Configuration
Convention Over Configuration on the APIs.io network is a curated area collecting 5 resources — specifications, tools, and documentation — for this subject.
24 providers on the network work in this area, including Vert.x, Akka, Ruby Programming Language and Popular API Gems, Test First, Quarkus, Helidon, and 18 more — each links out to that provider’s APIs, schemas, and governance artifacts.
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About this area
Convention over Configuration (CoC) is a software design principle that prefers sensible defaults and standard patterns over explicit, repetitive configuration. Frameworks that adopt CoC reduce the number of decisions a developer must make to start a new project while still allowing overrides for non-standard cases. CoC was popularized by Ruby on Rails but predates Rails, drawing on UI principles like the principle of least astonishment and conventions in JavaBeans, Maven, and other Java ecosystems. The principle continues to shape modern frameworks such as Spring Boot, Next.js, Astro, Phoenix, Ember, Hugo, and Remix.
Curated resources (5)
Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails is the framework that popularized convention over configuration. By default, an ActiveRecord model named Sale maps to a sales table, controllers map to RESTful resources, and the directory layout under a...
Spring Boot
Spring Boot is the convention-over-configuration evolution of the Spring Framework. Auto-configuration detects classpath dependencies and wires beans automatically, starter dependencies bundle common stacks, and stand...
Apache Maven
Apache Maven introduced a strict project layout (src/main/java, src/test/java, target/) and a convention-driven build lifecycle. A pom.xml that declares dependencies and a parent POM is enough for most Java projects t...
Next.js
Next.js exemplifies convention over configuration in modern web frameworks. The pages and app directory conventions auto-generate routes, file-based layouts, error boundaries, loading UI, and API routes without explic...
Hugo Static Site Generator
Hugo defines content, layouts, archetypes, and partials by directory convention. A content/posts directory yields a section with a list page and per-post pages without explicit routing configuration.
Related providers (25)
Top 24 of 25 network providers tagged for this area — search the full set on apis.io.
| Provider | Description | APIs | Rating |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vert.x | Eclipse Vert.x is a toolkit for building reactive applications on the JVM, providing support for multiple languages including Java, JavaScript, Groovy, Ruby, and Kotlin with an ... | 7 | developing |
| Akka | Akka is a toolkit and runtime for building highly concurrent, distributed, and resilient message-driven applications on the JVM using the actor model for Java and Scala. Maintai... | 4 | thin |
| Ruby Programming Language and Popular API Gems | A profile of the Ruby programming language ecosystem from an API perspective: the language and its standard library HTTP surface (Net::HTTP), the rubygems.org package registry a... | 15 | thin |
| Test First | A software development approach where tests are written before the implementation code, ensuring code quality and driving design decisions through test requirements. Test-first ... | 5 | thin |
| Quarkus | Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native Java framework tailored for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot, designed to build cloud-native microservices and serverless applications with fast startu... | 1 | thin |
| Helidon | Helidon is a collection of Java libraries from Oracle for writing microservices that run on a fast web core powered by Netty, supporting MicroProfile and reactive programming mo... | 1 | thin |
| Micronaut | Micronaut is a modern JVM-based framework for building modular, easily testable microservice and serverless applications with ahead-of-time compilation and minimal memory consum... | 1 | thin |
| Dropwizard | Dropwizard is a Java framework for developing ops-friendly, high-performance RESTful web services, pulling together stable, mature libraries from the Java ecosystem into a simpl... | 1 | thin |
| Encore | Encore is an open source development platform for building type-safe, production-ready backend applications and distributed systems. It supports Go and TypeScript, provides buil... | 2 | thin |
| Flask | Flask is a lightweight WSGI web application framework for Python, designed to make getting started quick and easy with the ability to scale up to complex applications. It provid... | 1 | minimal |
| Fastify | Fastify is a fast and low-overhead web framework for Node.js, designed for building high-performance APIs and microservices. It features a powerful plugin architecture, JSON Sch... | 1 | minimal |
| Hapi | hapi is a rich, configuration-centric framework for building web applications and APIs in Node.js. It provides a powerful plugin system, built-in input validation with Joi, auth... | 1 | minimal |
| Moleculer | Moleculer is a fast, modern, and powerful microservices framework for Node.js. It provides built-in service discovery, load balancing, fault tolerance with circuit breaker, requ... | 1 | minimal |
| Go Micro | Go Micro is a distributed systems framework for building microservices in Go, providing service discovery, load balancing, message encoding, RPC, and async messaging out of the ... | 1 | minimal |
| Lagom | Lagom is an open source framework for building reactive microservice systems in Java and Scala, built on top of Akka and Play Framework, designed for distributed architectures. | 1 | minimal |
| Kitex | Kitex is a high-performance, extensible RPC framework for building microservices in Go, developed by ByteDance. It supports Thrift and Protocol Buffers serialization, provides b... | 1 | minimal |
| Kratos | Kratos is a Go framework for building cloud-native microservices, originally created at Bilibili. It provides built-in support for HTTP and gRPC transports, service discovery, c... | 1 | minimal |
| NestJS | NestJS is a progressive Node.js framework for building efficient, reliable, and scalable server-side applications. Built with TypeScript and inspired by Angular, it provides an ... | 1 | minimal |
| Nameko | Nameko is a microservices framework for Python that provides tools for building, testing, and running services. It supports RPC over AMQP, HTTP endpoints, WebSocket connections,... | 1 | minimal |
| Go Kit | Go Kit is a programming toolkit for building microservices in Go, emphasizing domain-driven design, transport-agnostic service definitions, and best practices for distributed sy... | 1 | minimal |
| Seneca | Seneca is a microservices toolkit for Node.js that uses a pattern-matching approach to message handling. It provides transport independence, allowing services to communicate ove... | 1 | minimal |
| CONVENTIONS.md | CONVENTIONS.md is a Markdown convention popularized by AI pair programming tools such as aider and adopted by AI coding agents like Cursor, Cline, and Claude Code. It documents ... | 2 | minimal |
| API Style Guides | A landscape index of public API style guides published by leading technology companies and standards bodies. API style guides codify conventions for resource modeling, URI desig... | 11 | minimal |
| Python Standard Library and Popular | A collection of commonly used Python APIs and libraries including the standard library and popular frameworks like Flask, Django, FastAPI, Pandas, and NumPy. | 8 | minimal |
Related areas
Tags: Conventions, Design Principle, Frameworks, Software Design.
Sourced from the api-evangelist/convention-over-configuration topic repo.