orchardcore-recipes

Orchard Core Recipes

Recipes are JSON documents that configure a tenant through ordered steps. Use a recipe for repeatable setup, environment provisioning, deployment imports, or migration updates. Steps are processed in order and their names are case-insensitive at handler dispatch, but use the registered casing below and in the schemas.

Recipe location, discovery, and execution

• Place an extension recipe at Recipes/<name>.recipe.json in a module or theme. The extension's manifest makes that extension discoverable; there is no separate recipe manifest file.
• RecipeHarvester iterates enabled extensions and reads each extension's Recipes folder. The application recipe harvester also contributes application-level recipes.
• Set issetuprecipe to true only for recipes intended to appear during tenant setup.
• Run a discovered recipe from Configuration → Recipes, during setup, or from another recipe using the Recipes step. A data migration may execute a recipe in its module/theme Migrations folder through IRecipeMigrator.
• Programmatic execution uses IRecipeExecutor.ExecuteAsync(executionId, recipeDescriptor, environment, cancellationToken). A RecipeDescriptor carries the recipe metadata, base path, file provider, and recipe file.

Use .recipe.json, not arbitrary .json, for discovered extension recipes. Recipes can contain JSON comments, but generated automation should emit strict JSON unless comments are intentionally needed.

Authoring rules

• Enable features before invoking their recipe steps.
• Keep content definition, settings, and workflow records under source control.
• Use variables and helpers such as [js: uuid()], [file:text('...')], [env:NAME], and [appsettings:Section:Key] rather than inventing stable IDs or embedding secrets.
• All examples below are complete recipe fragments. Preserve the { "steps": [ ... ] } root wrapper when composing a recipe.
• For recipe-generated content, use expressions to generate ContentItemId, ContentItemVersionId, and timestamps rather than manually invented IDs.