generate rewrite the parts of a corpus derived from its records

kac generate [--check] [--no-color]

Option	What it does
--check	Fail if a generated file is stale instead of writing it.
--no-color	Turn colour off. NO_COLOR in the environment does the same.

What it does

generate rewrites the parts of your corpus that kac derives from frontmatter and the schema. That covers each type's index page, the frontmatter reference and the checks table on each type page, and the taxonomy's own tables. kac builds each one from what the corpus has now.

generate rewrites a generated block between its markers, so the words around it stay yours. It writes each type's _index.md whole instead, and that file has no markers. Generation says what each one is built from.

Run it after you add or edit a record, and before you commit. Run --check in CI, which writes nothing.

Examples

A plain run

kac generate

A run that changes nothing says so:

generated files already up to date; nothing written.

A stale check

kac generate --check

--check recomputes every generated file, lists the ones that differ, and exits 1. It writes nothing:

generated files are stale. These differ from the schema/frontmatter:
  glossary/_index.md
run:  kac generate

Run kac generate on your own machine and commit the result. CI never commits.

A pipeline step

dotnet tool run kac generate --check

Give the job read-only permission. Running it in CI has the whole workflow.

Known limits

It does not stand a type up. generate covers the types listed in types: in .corpus.yaml. It creates no page and no folder for a type that is missing one. validate reports that instead.

Do not edit generated content by hand. Where an index looks wrong, the frontmatter it was built from is wrong.

The types graph is written for the narrowest renderer. Every corpus gets the same Mermaid subset an Azure DevOps wiki can render, whatever it publishes to. Generation says why.

validate checks that every file this writes into still has both markers of each block.