Fluidify

A modern alternative to T4 — an MSBuild task that processes Fluid (Liquid) template files at build time to generate code, configuration, or any other text output.

Installation

dotnet add package Fluidify

Fluidify is a development dependency — it runs only at build time and adds nothing to your project's runtime output.

Usage

Add <Fluidify> items to your project file. Each item points to a .fluid template, and any custom metadata you set becomes a template variable.

<ItemGroup>
  <Fluidify Include="WelcomeMessage.cs.fluid" Name="Alice" />
  <Fluidify Include="Config/appsettings.json.fluid" AppName="MyApp" Version="1.0.0" />
</ItemGroup>

Templates use standard Liquid syntax:

WelcomeMessage.cs.fluid

public static class WelcomeMessage
{
    public const string Text = "Welcome, {{ Name }}!";
}

Building the project renders each template before compilation. The output path is inferred by stripping the .fluid extension, so WelcomeMessage.cs.fluid produces WelcomeMessage.cs.

Fluidify works with any text format — C#, JSON, HTML, YAML, or anything else. The .fluid extension is just a convention; the template itself is plain text with Liquid tags.

Compilation

Generated .cs files are automatically included in compilation. Fluidify handles deduplication, so you don't need to add <Compile Remove> for generated files.

To opt out of compilation, set Compile="false":

<ItemGroup>
  <Fluidify Include="WelcomeMessage.cs.fluid" Name="Alice" Compile="false" />
</ItemGroup>

For non-.cs outputs that should be compiled, set Compile="true" explicitly:

<ItemGroup>
  <Fluidify Include="Templates/Helper.fluid" Compile="true" />
</ItemGroup>

Custom output path

Use the Destination metadata to write the output to a different location:

<ItemGroup>
  <Fluidify Include="Templates/report.html.fluid"
            Destination="Output/report.html"
            Title="Status Report"
            Author="MyApp" />
</ItemGroup>

Relative paths are resolved from the project directory. Directories are created automatically.

Source control

We recommend committing generated files to source control rather than gitignoring them. This way IDE features like IntelliSense and navigation work immediately after clone without building first, and git diff shows when generated output changes unexpectedly.

How it works

Fluidify registers an MSBuild target that runs before CoreCompile. For each <Fluidify> item it:

1. Parses the .fluid file using the Fluid template engine
2. Passes all item metadata (except Destination and Compile) as template variables
3. Writes the rendered output to the inferred or specified destination

MSBuild tracks input and output timestamps, so templates are only re-rendered when the source file changes.

License

Apache-2.0