Ports and Adapters Architecture

Kind: style

Layer: Structural Core

Aliases: Hexagonal Architecture, Ports and Adapters

Record: architecture:ports-and-adapters-architecture

Severity: recommended

Scope: application, service, component

Canonical: Ontology

A convention of keeping a domain core free of framework and data types, with every external dependency behind a port the application owns and implemented by an adapter outside it.

Listed in Architecture principles, after Session Management and before Clean Architecture.

Requires

• Ports
• Adapters
• Dependency Inversion Principle (DIP)
• Domain Core

Reinforces

• Replaceability
• Testability
• Clean Architecture

Enables

• Infrastructure Independence
• External System Isolation

Conflicts with

• Framework Leakage

In tension with

• Boilerplate
• Initial Complexity

Tensions

• Ports and Adapters Architecture / Boilerplate
• Ports and Adapters Architecture / Initial Complexity

Violated by

• Concrete Coupling
• Framework Leakage

Refactored by

• Introduce Port
• Extract Adapter
• Move Framework Outward

Severity

• recommended

Category

• Codebase / System Architecture Styles

Linked from

• The layer spine
• The direction axis
• Anti-patterns
• Correctness / Determinism / Verification
• Core Modular Design
• SOLID / Object-Oriented Design
• Plugin / Extensibility / IoC
• Codebase / System Architecture Styles
• Codebase / System Architecture Styles
• Core Vocabulary
• Severity levels
• The resolutions