F# Snippets web site

This is a work-in-progress project to build a new version of the www.fssnip.net web site. The project has some basic structure, but there is still a lot of work that needs to be done, so I'm looking for contributors!

• There is a list of issues on GitHub with various work items. Many of them not too hard and so this might be a fun way to contribute to your first open-source F# project! Start with the priority issues which need to be solved before we can switch to the new version!

• To discuss the project, join the #fsharp channel on functionalprogramming.slack.com. To join the Slack team, go to fpchat.com. Feel free to ping me on Twitter at @tomaspetricek.

Running web site locally

There is one manual step you need to do before you can run the web site locally, which is to download sample data. To do this, download data.zip from this web page and extract the contents into data (so that you have data/index.json) in your root.

Once you're done with this, you can run build.sh (on Mac/Linux) or build.cmd (on Windows) to run the web site. There is also a Visual Studio solution which can be started with F5, but the build scripts are nicer because they automatically watch for changes.

Project architecture & structure

In the current (development) version, the project uses file system as a data storage. In the final version, we'll store the snippets in Azure blob storage (see the issue for adding this).

The web page is mostly read-only. There are about 2 new snippets per day, so insertion can be more expensive and not particularly sophisticated. Also, the metadata about all the snippets is quite small (about 1MB JSON) and so we can keep all metadata in memory for browsing. When a snippet is inserted, we update the in-memory metadata and save it to a JSON file (in a blob).

So, if you download the data.zip file (above), you get the following:

• data/index.json - this is the JSON with metadata about all snippets. This is loaded when the web site starts (and it is updated & saved when a new snippet is inserted)
• data/formatted/<id>/<version> is a file that contains formatted HTML for a snippet with a specified ID; we also support multiple versions of snippets.
• data/source/<id>/<version> is a file with the original source code for a snippet

Other most important files and folders in the project are:

• app.fsx defines the routing for web requests and puts everything together
• code/pages/*.fs are files that handle specific things for individual pages
• code/common/*.fs are common utilities, data access code etc.
• templates/*.html are DotLiquid templates for various pages
• web/* is folder with static files (CSS, JavaScript, images, etc.)