# Discovery System

URL: /docs/reference/architecture/rendering/discovery/
Section: rendering
Tags: rendering, discovery, content-discovery, asset-discovery, file-scanning

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Discovery System The discovery system is responsible for finding and cataloging all content, sections, and assets in a Bengal site. Content Discovery (bengal/discovery/content_discovery.py) Purpose Walks the content directory recursively to create Page and Section objects Responsibilities Walks content directory recursively Creates Page and Section objects Parses frontmatter Organizes content into hierarchy Includes autodoc-generated markdown files Uses Utilities: Delegates to bengal.utils.file_io.read_text_file() for robust file reading with encoding fallback Process Flow Start at content root directory Recursively traverse directories For each directory: Create Section object Look for _index.md (section index page) Find all markdown files For each markdown file: Read file content Parse frontmatter (YAML/TOML) Extract metadata Create Page object Associate with parent Section Build section hierarchy Return organized Pages and Sections Features Encoding fallback (UTF-8 → latin-1) UTF-8 BOM stripping during read to avoid confusing frontmatter parsing Error handling for malformed files (frontmatter syntax errors fall back to content-only) Automatic section creation Hierarchical organization Cross-reference index building Asset Discovery (bengal/discovery/asset_discovery.py) Purpose Finds all static assets and creates Asset objects Responsibilities Finds all static assets Preserves directory structure Creates Asset objects with metadata Tracks asset types (CSS, JS, images, fonts, etc.) Process Flow Walk assets directory For each file: Determine asset type (by extension) Create Asset object Preserve relative path Track for processing Also discover theme assets Return organized Asset list Asset Types Images: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .gif, .webp, .svg Stylesheets: .css, .scss, .sass, .less Scripts: .js, .mjs, .ts Fonts: .woff, .woff2, .ttf, .otf, .eot Data: .json, .yaml, .yml, .toml, .xml Documents: .pdf, .doc, .docx Other: Any other files Features Type detection by extension Path preservation Metadata extraction Theme asset integration Optimization hints

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Metadata:
- Author: lbliii
- Word Count: 271
- Reading Time: 1 minutes