What is Fornax?

Fornax is a static site generator written in F#. I think it's pretty neat. Fornax generates static sites through a pipeline of F# scripts called loaders that inject content into a global context that is then consumed by more F# scripts called generators that mold the content its final form. The workflow is decidedly hands-on with a distinct code first approach. This gives Fornax incredible flexibility.

Getting Started

Fornax is installed as a global .NET Core tool on the command line with:

dotnet tool install fornax -g

We can then create a new folder for our new Fornax site, move into it, then:

fornax new

This will create a new Fornax site using the default blog template.

Now that we have a default Fornax site set up we can run fornax watch which will spin up a little server that watches for changes to our project.

Let's take a look at the folder structure now that we have a working Fornax site.

• _lib
  • Any external libraries we might like to use go in here and can be referenced from the script files.
  • By default this contains:
    • Fornax.Core.dll
    • Markdig.dll
• _public
  • This is where the final production built files are created after a build.
• loaders
  • Contains all scripts that load data into the global context.
• generators
  • Contains all scripts that generate files in _public based on the global context created by loaders.
• images
  • Images used by our app
• js
  • JS used by our app
• posts
  • This is a domain specific folder used to hold blog posts written in markdown.
• style
  • CSS used by the app
• config.fsx
  • This script runs first, we use it to configure the behavior of our generators and add any additional data like secret keys or SQL connection strings.

Next time we'll take a look an in depth look at loaders and generators and what they can do.