Fornax

Fornax is a static site generator using type safe F# DSL to define page templates.

Working features

Defining templates in F# DSL
Creating pages using templates from .md files with layout entry
Creating plain pages without templates from md files without layout entry
Transforming .less files to .css files
Transforming .scss files to .css files (requires having sass installed)
Copying other static content to the output directory

Planned features

Defining .css styles using F# DSL
Handling site settings defined in multiple files (a la Jekyll's _data folder) (multiple models? unified model?)

Installation

Fornax is released as a global .Net Core tool. You can install it with dotnet tool install fornax -g

CLI Application

The main functionality of Fornax comes from CLI applications that lets user scaffold, and generate webpages.

fornax new - scaffolds new blog in current working directory using really simple template
fornax build - builds webpage, puts output to _public folder
fornax watch - starts a small webserver that hosts your generated site, and a background process that recompiles the site whenever any changes are detected. This is the recommended way of working with Fornax.
fornax clean - removes output directory and any temp files
fornax version - prints out the currently-installed version of Fornax
fornax help - prints out help

Website definition

Fornax is using normal F# code (F# script files) to define templates and data types representing content, and yaml and Markdown to provide content (fitting defined models) for the templates. A sample website can be found in the samples folder - to build it, run fornax build in this folder.

Site Settings

Site settings are information passed to every page during generation - every template has access to this data.

The model representing site settings is defined in siteModel.fsx file in the root folder of the website, content of settings is defined in _config.yml file in the root folder of the website.

Sample siteModel.fsx:

type SiteModel = {
    SomeGlobalValue : string
}

Sample _config.yml:

SomeGlobalValue: "Test global value"

Templates

Templates are F# script files representing different templates that can be used in the website. They need to #load siteModel.fsx file, and #r Fornax.Core.dll. They need to define F# record called Model which defines additional settings passed to this particular template, and generate function of following signature: SiteModel -> Model -> Post list -> string -> HtmlElement. SiteModel is type representing global settings of webpage, Model is type representing settings for this template, Post list contains simplified information about all available posts in the blog (useful for navigation, creating tag cloud etc.) string is main content of post (already compiled to html).

Templates are defined using DSL defined in Html module of Fornax.Core.

All templates should be defined in templates folder.

Sample template:

#r "../lib/Fornax.Core.dll"
#load "../siteModel.fsx"

open Html
open SiteModel

type Model = {
    Name : string
    Surname : string
}

let generate (siteModel : SiteModel) (mdl : Model) (posts: Post list) (content : string) =
    html [] [
        div [] [
            span [] [ !! ("Hello world " + mdl.Name) ]
            span [] [ !! content ]
            span [] [ !! siteModel.SomeGlobalValue ]
        ]
    ]

Page content

Content files are .md files containing page content, and a header with settings (defined using yaml). The header part is parsed, and passed to the template's generate function as Model. The content part is compiled to html and also passed to the generate function. The header part needs to have the layout entry which defines what template will be used for the page.

Sample page:

---
layout: post
Name: Ja3
Surname: Ja4
---
# Something else

Some blog post written in Markdown

Post list

Templates have Post list as one of the input parameters that can be used for navigation, creating tag clouds etc. The Post is a record of the following structure:

type Post = {
    link : string
    title: string
    author: string option
    published: System.DateTime option
    tags: string list
    content: string
}

It's filled based on respective entries in layout part of the post content file. link is using name of the file - it's usually something like \posts\post1.html

FAQ

Hmmm... it looks similar to Jekyll, doesn't it?
- Yes, indeed. But the main advantage over Jekyll is the type safe DSL for defining templates, which uses a normal programming language - no additional syntax to things like loops or conditional statements, it's also very easy to compose templates - you just #load other templates and execute them as normal F# functions.
What about F# Formatting?
- F# Formatting is really good project, but it doesn't provide its own rendering / templating engine - it's using Razor for that. Fornax right now is handling only rendering / templating - hopefully, it should work pretty well as a rendering engine for F# Formatting.

How to contribute

Imposter syndrome disclaimer: I want your help. No really, I do.

There might be a little voice inside that tells you you're not ready; that you need to do one more tutorial, or learn another framework, or write a few more blog posts before you can help me with this project.

I assure you, that's not the case.

This project has some clear Contribution Guidelines and expectations that you can read here.

The contribution guidelines outline the process that you'll need to follow to get a patch merged. By making expectations and process explicit, I hope it will make it easier for you to contribute.

And you don't just have to write code. You can help out by writing documentation, tests, or even by giving feedback about this work. (And yes, that includes giving feedback about the contribution guidelines.)

Thank you for contributing!

Contributing and copyright

The project is hosted on GitHub where you can report issues, fork the project and submit pull requests. Please read Contribution Guide

The library is available under MIT license, which allows modification and redistribution for both commercial and non-commercial purposes.

pblasucci / Fornax