FoBiSFortran Building System

Automatic dependency-resolving build tool for modern Fortran projects — no makefiles, no boilerplate.

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.

Quick start

📄

fobos — the FoBiS makefile

A concise INI-style configuration file replaces makefiles entirely. Define multiple build modes, templates, variables, and custom rules — all in one readable file.

fobos reference

🌐

GitHub integration

Declare dependencies in a `[dependencies]` fobos section — `fobis fetch` clones, pins to branch/tag/rev, and pre-builds them; `fobis build` picks them up automatically. Install any GitHub-hosted FoBiS project directly with `fobis install user/repo`.

Fetch deps & install

🔬

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

🤖

JSON output & Claude Code skill

Pass `--json` to `fobis build`, `fobis clean`, or `fobis fetch` for machine-readable structured output — ideal for CI and AI agent workflows. Install the bundled `/fobis` Claude Code skill for expert AI assistance right in your editor.

JSON output & Claude skill

🆓

Free and open source

Released under the GNU GPL v3 license. Free to use, study, modify, and distribute. Contributions welcome — see the contributing guidelines on GitHub.

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.

bash

# 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:

ini

[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/

bash

fobis build -mode release

zero-configuration build	simplify complex dependency

GH integration, project install	GH integration, dependancies fetch

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@cnr.it · GitHub

Copyrights

FoBiS.py is an open source project distributed under the GPL v3 license. Anyone interested in using, developing, or contributing to FoBiS.py is welcome — see the contributing guidelines.