F# Snippets - Web site

This is a new version of the www.fssnip.net web site. The project implements most of the old functionality, but there is still a lot of room for improvements and it is also a great way to get started with F# and Suave!

• 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!

• To discuss the Project, register at Slack and visit the #general channel, for more infos see the Slack Guide.

• 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 the data dump from the fssnip-data project 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.

Updated dev scripts

There is now a PowerShell script fssnip.ps1 which you can call with a parameter that is one of 4 commands:

• build : Builds the project and copies it into ./wwwroot directory
• run : Runs the project locally
• deploy: Deploys the project into Azure
• upload: Downloads the blobs from the data dump and uploads them to Azure blob storage

For some of these commands to work, you will need to edit the script to provide 2 environment variables (Recaptcha secret and the target blob service connection string).

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.)