If your DeployHQ projects list has grown into an endless scroll, you already know the friction: hunting for the right staging project among two dozen others, second-guessing which acme-prod
belongs to which client, and losing a few seconds every single deploy. We built project folders to fix exactly that — a simple, new way to group related projects into collections so your dashboard maps to how you actually work.
Folders are especially handy if you run deployments for more than one client, team, or product line. Put everything for a client in a single folder, and their staging site, production site, and supporting microservices sit together instead of scattered across an alphabetical wall of projects.
What project folders actually do
A folder is a collection of projects. Each project belongs to a single folder — it's a flat, one-folder-per-project structure, so there's no nesting to reason about and no ambiguity about where a project lives. You group, you filter, you find what you need. That's the whole idea.
On the Projects page, a sidebar gives you the controls:
- All Projects — the full view. Any projects you've marked as favourites float to the top here, regardless of which folder they're in.
- Favourites — a quick lane for the projects you touch most.
- Your folders — listed alphabetically, each one filtering the view to just its projects when selected.
- Ungrouped — everything you haven't filed into a folder yet.
Selecting any sidebar entry filters the main view to match. And crucially, search still spans every project across every folder — so organising into folders never hides anything from you. You get structure when you're browsing and a flat search when you're hunting.
Why this matters for agencies and freelancers
If you manage client work, a crowded projects dashboard is a daily tax. This is where folders earn their keep, and it's the reason we think agencies running deployments across many clients will feel the difference fastest.
The pattern we'd recommend starting with:
One folder per client. Client A's staging environment, production environment, and any microservices all live in the same folder. When Client A calls, you click their folder and everything relevant is right there — no scanning, no guessing. This builds directly on the workflow we covered in how DeployHQ helps web agencies manage multiple projects, giving that multi-client setup a visual home.
Freelancers benefit from the same move at a smaller scale. If you've already ditched SSH and FTP for automated deployments, folders are the next tidy-up: one folder per client keeps a growing roster of side projects and retainers from turning into clutter.
You don't have to organise by client, either. Folders work just as well grouped by:
- Team — front-end, platform, data, each with their own collection.
- Environment group — separating a batch of internal tooling from client-facing production work.
- Product line — one folder per product when you're running several under one roof.
Setting up folders in a couple of clicks
Everything here lives on the Projects page and its sidebar. The full step-by-step lives in the support guide on organising projects into folders, but here's the shape of it.
Create a folder. Any user who can create projects can create a folder, straight from the sidebar. An empty folder doesn't touch your existing projects — nothing moves until you decide it should — so there's no risk in setting up your structure first and filing projects in afterward.
Assign a project to a folder. Two ways:
- Open the project, go to its Settings page, pick a folder from the Folder dropdown (or choose
No folder
to pull it back out), and Save. - Or just drag the project onto a folder in the sidebar to move it.
That drag-and-drop is the fast path when you're doing an initial cleanup and want to file a dozen projects in one sitting.
Ungrouped as an intake lane
Here's a small workflow trick worth adopting: treat Ungrouped as a triage lane rather than a junk drawer. Every new project starts life ungrouped, so that section naturally becomes your needs filing
queue. Onboard a new client, spin up their first project, and it waits in Ungrouped until you drop it into the right folder. Glance at Ungrouped periodically and it doubles as a reminder of anything you've set up but not yet organised.
Pair that with Favourites for whatever you're actively shipping this week, and you've got a two-speed system: Favourites for the hot work, folders for the durable structure, and Ungrouped as the inbox in between.
Want to keep your dashboard clean and your pipeline fast? Start deploying with DeployHQ for free and set your folders up on day one.
Permissions: let a lead own the structure
Folder management respects your existing access model, which matters the moment more than one person shares an account. Account administrators and users granted access to all projects can rename and delete folders. Users with limited project access can't — they work within the structure but can't reshape it.
For an agency, that maps cleanly onto real roles. A lead administrator owns the folder structure — deciding that every client gets a folder and keeping the naming consistent — while contractors and junior team members operate inside their scoped access without accidentally renaming or removing a client's folder. If you're formalising who-can-do-what across your pipeline, it's the same access-control thinking auditors expect when they review deployment workflows for SOC 2 compliance.
One reassuring detail: deleting a folder never deletes the projects inside it. Those projects simply become ungrouped, ready to be reassigned. Restructuring is always safe — the worst case is a few projects landing back in the Ungrouped lane.
Take it further: team management for scoped access
Folders organise what you see. To control who can see and touch what, pair them with team management — together they're the complete control story for a shared agency account. Team management is available on DeployHQ's Business and Enterprise plans.
A team is a group of users who share the same permissions and project access. Add someone to a team and they inherit everything that team is granted, so you configure access once rather than fiddling with it per person. Each team sets two things:
- Account-level permissions — whether members can create projects, manage users, manage billing, manage the deployment agents, or act as full account administrators.
- Project access — either all projects (with the option to exclude sensitive ones) or a hand-picked set of specific projects, with granular control over who can deploy to which servers, update project configuration, and manage config files.
That maps directly onto a folder-per-client layout. Give a contractor team access to only the specific projects for the client they're working on, while your lead administrators keep all-projects access and own the folder structure. Because a user can belong to several teams and their effective access is the combination — the most permissive rule wins — you can layer a can deploy production
team on top of a client X
team and get exactly the access you'd expect. Teams are created and managed under Settings → Team Management; the team management guide covers every permission in detail.
Automating folders through the API
Folders are available through the DeployHQ API too, using folder identifiers. The API supports listing, creating, renaming, and deleting folders, along with assigning projects to them.
That opens up the best part for teams that onboard clients regularly: auto-provisioning. Wire folder creation into your onboarding flow and a new client's folder can be created automatically the moment their account is set up, with their first project assigned to it — no manual filing at all. If you've already explored automating your deployment workflows with the DeployHQ API, folder operations slot straight into the same scripts and webhooks you're already running.
A small feature that scales with you
Project folders won't change how a single deploy runs — your build pipelines and zero-downtime releases work exactly as before. What they change is everything around the deploy: how quickly you find the right project, how sensibly a shared account stays organised, and how little friction there is when your project count keeps climbing. If you're still weighing platforms and how they handle scale, our rundown of the best CI/CD tools compared on pricing and features is a good next read.
Set up a folder per client, mark your active work as favourites, and let Ungrouped keep you honest about what still needs filing. It's a few minutes of setup that pays off on every deploy after.
Ready to organise your deployments the way you actually work? Compare DeployHQ plans and get started — folders are part of the projects experience, waiting in the sidebar.
Questions or feedback on project folders? Email us at support@deployhq.com or reach out on X at @deployhq — we'd love to hear how you're organising your projects.