FoBiS — Fortran Building System
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Automatic dependency-resolving build tool for modern Fortran projects — no makefiles, no boilerplate.
Package manger highly integrated with GitHub, install and fetch project dependencies.
Add instrospective doctests to your Fortran project and exploit AI-powered programmatic buildings with the provided AI skill.
Manage a whole ecosystem of interconnected repositories: dashboard, cross-repo checks, release train.
| ⚡ Zero-configuration builds Drop FoBiS into any Fortran project and run fobis build. It scans sources, resolves all use, include, and module dependencies automatically, and compiles in the correct order — no makefiles, no boilerplate. Convention-based discovery finds src/, source/, and app/ directories automatically. Quick start |
📄 fobos — the FoBiS makefile A concise INI-style configuration file replaces makefiles entirely. Define multiple build modes, templates, variables, custom rules, feature flags, multi-target sections, and hooks — all in one readable file. fobos reference |
| 🌐 GitHub integration Declare dependencies in a [dependencies] fobos section — fobis fetch clones, pins to branch/tag/rev/semver, and pre-builds them; fobis build picks them up automatically. Reproducible builds via fobos.lock. Install any GitHub-hosted FoBiS project directly with fobis install user/repo. Fetch deps · Lock file |
🏗️ Named build profiles & feature flags One-word compiler flag presets ( debug, release, asan, coverage) for every supported compiler. Feature flags let you activate named compile-time options without separate build modes — mix and match freely. Build profiles · Feature flags |
🧪 Integrated test runner & coveragefobis test discovers, compiles, and runs all Fortran test programs — no external harness needed. fobis coverage generates HTML/XML reports via gcovr or lcov and can fail CI when coverage drops below a threshold. Test runner · Coverage |
🔬 Introspective doctests Embed micro-unit-tests directly inside Fortran comment docstrings. FoBiS generates, compiles, and runs volatile test programs automatically — inspired by Python's doctest module, no test harness needed. Doctests |
| ⚡ Build cache Content-addressed cache keyed on source commit, compiler, and flags — reuses object files across clean builds and branch switches. fobis cache list/clean for housekeeping. Build cache |
🤖 Introspect & Claude Code skillfobis introspect --all emits machine-readable JSON of the full project graph — sources, compiler flags, dependencies, targets. Powers the bundled /fobis Claude Code skill for AI-assisted builds right in your editor. introspect · Claude skill |
| 📋 Scaffold — boilerplate sync Keep CI workflows, docs configs, license files, and scripts identical across all your Fortran repos. fobis scaffold status shows drift; fobis scaffold sync fixes it; fobis scaffold init bootstraps new projects. All templates bundled inside FoBiS — no extra dependencies. Scaffold reference |
🧠 LLM commit messages Generate well-formed Conventional Commits messages for staged changes via a local LLM. Supports Ollama and any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp) — no cloud account, no API key, no data leaving your machine. LLM commit guide |
| 🧭 Ecosystem dashboard Register your interconnected repositories once; fobis ecosystem dashboard shows them all at a glance — releases due (bump suggested from Conventional Commits), CI at HEAD, scaffold drift, dependency pins behind the upstream heads — in the terminal or as a themed HTML page with a live dependency diagram. Ecosystem guide |
🚂 Check & release trainfobis ecosystem check LIB builds and tests every project downstream against your local, unreleased working copy. fobis ecosystem release releases everything due, dependencies first, refusing to start while any project is blocked and stopping safely at the first failure. ecosystem reference |
Why FoBiS?
Modern Fortran's module system is powerful — but tracking inter-module compilation order by hand in a makefile quickly becomes a nightmare as project size grows. Every time you add a module, rename a file, or restructure directories, the makefile needs manual updates.
FoBiS solves this completely. It parses source files on every invocation, rebuilds the dependency graph from scratch, and compiles in the correct order — with no configuration required for simple projects.
# That's it. FoBiS finds all programs, resolves all dependencies, compiles.
fobis buildFor complex projects, a single fobos file in the project root replaces makefiles entirely:
[modes]
modes = debug release
[debug]
compiler = gnu
cflags = -c -O0 -g -Wall
build_dir = ./build/debug/
[release]
compiler = gnu
cflags = -c -O3
build_dir = ./build/release/
fobis build -mode release| zero-configuration build | simplify complex dependency | |:---:|:---:| | !basic build | !complex dependancy | | GH integration, project install | GH integration, dependancies fetch | | !project install | !dependancies fetch | | ecosystem: graph and dashboard | ecosystem: check before releasing | | !ecosystem dashboard | !ecosystem check |
Ecosystem — manage interconnected projects
Several Fortran libraries, each in its own repository, depending on each other? Register them once and fobis ecosystem handles them as a whole — read-only unless you ask it to act, and nothing is ever pushed without your confirmation.
fobis ecosystem discover # FoBiS repos under your root not registered yet
fobis ecosystem add PENF FACE BeFoR64 # register them (your config keeps its comments)
fobis ecosystem graph # release order and dependency tree
fobis ecosystem dashboard # releases due, CI, drift, stale pins (--format html for a page)
fobis ecosystem exec -- 'fobis clean && fobis build' # any command, every project, dependencies first
fobis ecosystem check PENF # does my local PENF break anything downstream?
fobis ecosystem release --dry-run # what needs a release, with which version
fobis ecosystem release # the release train| pre-release impact check | release train | |:---:|:---:| | !ecosystem check | !ecosystem release |
See the ecosystem guide for the concepts, a one-minute demo you can run locally, and recipes.
Scaffold — boilerplate management
fobis scaffold keeps CI workflows, docs configs, license files, and other boilerplate in sync across all your Fortran repos. All templates are bundled inside FoBiS — no external dependencies.
fobis scaffold status # drift report: OK / OUTDATED / MISSING per file
fobis scaffold sync --dry-run # preview diffs without writing
fobis scaffold sync --yes # apply all updates silently
fobis scaffold init # bootstrap a new project (creates src/, docs/, .github/, …)
fobis scaffold list # list all managed files and their categoriesProject variables ({{NAME}}, {{AUTHORS}}, {{REPOSITORY}}, …) are resolved from the fobos [project] section, the git remote URL, and git config. See the scaffold reference for full details.
LLM-assisted commit messages
fobis commit generates Conventional Commits messages for your staged changes using a local LLM — no cloud account, no API key, no data leaving your machine.
# Stage your changes as usual
git add fobis/Commit.py fobis/cli/commit.py
Generate the message (print only — you review before committing)
fobis commit
Generate and commit in one step after interactive review
fobis commit --apply
Persist your LLM settings
fobis commit --init-config # creates ~/.config/fobis/config.ini
fobis commit --show-config # inspect effective settingsWorks with Ollama (default) and any OpenAI-compatible server (LM Studio, vLLM, llama.cpp). The default model is qwen3-coder:30b-a3b-q4_K_M — a fast mixture-of-experts model that produces excellent commit messages.
See the LLM commit messages guide for setup instructions, model recommendations, and worked examples.
Showcases
Projects using FoBiS:
- ADAM — Accelerated fluid Dynamics on Adaptive Mesh refinement grids | GitHub
- BeFoR64 — Base64 encoding/decoding library for Fortran | GitHub
- FACE — Fortran ANSI Colors and Escape sequences | GitHub
- FiNeR — Fortran INI ParseR and generator | GitHub
- FLAP — Fortran command Line Arguments Parser | GitHub
- FUNDAL — Fortran UNified Device Acceleration Library | GitHub
- FOSSIL — FOrtran Stereo (si) Litography parser | GitHub
- MORTIF — MORTon Indexer (Z-order) Fortran environment | GitHub
- MOTIOn — Modular (HPC) Optimized Toolkit (for) IO (in fortra)n | GitHub
- PENF — Portability Environment for Fortran | GitHub
- StringiFor — Strings Fortran Manipulator with steroids | GitHub
- VecFor — Vector algebra class for Fortran | GitHub
- VTKFortran — pure Fortran VTK (XML) API | GitHub
Author
Stefano Zaghi — [email protected] · GitHub
Copyrights
FoBiS is an open source project distributed under the GPL v3 license. Anyone interested in using, developing, or contributing to FoBiS is welcome — see the contributing guidelines.