Synticore Builder Guide - Project Structure

Purpose

This page documents the structure a normal Synticore website project uses, including what each folder is for, what gets generated, and what is safe to delete.

If you need compiler-repository internals rather than project structure, use the Synticore Developer Docs.

Start With The Project Root

The selected project is the website content directory Synticore builds.

This compiler repository ships starter templates under template/.

The working example project lives separately at Synticore Website Compiler Example Repository.

The template directories are scaffold sources for creating new projects and are not themselves normal working project directories.

Typical layout:

<project>/
  config.json
  config.schema.json          (optional)
  info.json
  font-icon-template.scss     (optional override)
  in/
    _html/
    asset/
      audio/
      brand/
      css/
      file/
      font/
      font-icon/
      image/
      js/
      module/
      video/
    *.html
    browserconfig.xml
    manifest.webmanifest
    favicon.ico
  out/                        (generated)
  _cache/                     (generated)
  _log/                       (generated)
  _package/                   (generated when packaging)

What Each Project File Does

config.json

• Primary project configuration file
• Controls build behavior for this project

config.schema.json (Optional)

• Project-level schema extensions for custom keys
• Used by the GUI config editor for custom typing and widgets

info.json

• Project metadata, including project version
• Used by version checks and migration logic

font-icon-template.scss (Optional)

• Project-level override for font icon CSS template generation
• If missing, Synticore falls back to the compiler default
• See Synticore Builder Guide - Font Icon Guide for the user-facing font icon pipeline overview

in/

• Source input tree
• Synticore compiles and transforms from here into out/

out/

• Generated build output
• Deployable static site output
• Safe to delete

_cache/

• Incremental build cache and derived metadata
• Safe to delete
• May also contain project-local GUI or browser-tool state owned by tooling rather than by authored site content

_log/

• Per-project task logs
• Safe to delete

_package/

• Package output location
• Used for zip and/or directory packaging outputs

Compiler Root At A Glance

The compiler repository itself contains:

• gulpfile.js for task definitions and compiler pipeline logic
• gui.cmd / gui.sh for browser GUI launch
• setup.cmd / setup.sh for repository npm setup
• config/ for tool-level defaults and settings
• source/ for bundled resources, custom modules, migrations, and test data
• template/ for starter templates and shared scaffold content
• wiki/builder.md for the builder docs landing page
• wiki/developer.md for the developer docs landing page
• wiki/builder/ for builder-facing documentation pages
• wiki/developer/ for developer-facing documentation pages
• _log/ for compiler-level logs such as gulpfile.log and gui.log

Most site builders should care about the project root first and only visit compiler-root details when troubleshooting or extending the tool.

For a shorter explanation of which config/state files you normally edit versus ignore, use Synticore Builder Guide - Config Ownership.