FoBiS — Fortran Building System

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.

⚡ 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 & coverage fobis 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 skill fobis 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

Full documentation

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 build

For 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
GH integration, project install	GH integration, dependancies fetch

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 categories

Project 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 settings

Works 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 — stefano.zaghi@gmail.com · 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.