brianpos.fhir-distillery 2026.7.1.4

FHIR-Distillery

A simple tool for extracting HL7® FHIR® StructureDefinitions based on examples provided.

Creating a FHIR Implementation Guide can seem like hard work, and often development and release timelines get in the way of good practice, so this tool comes in handy to help pad out the extensions that you forgot to define during the modeling phase, and also helps demonstrate which ones you've never used too...

Specifically it will:

• Deduce extensions (creates the SD, updates the usage context and datatypes in existing SDs)
• Highlight property usage (sets max=0 when properties are not seen in any examples, except mandatory fields of course)

The current project is a dotnet tool that scans a folder of example resources, or a live FHIR server, and produces the StructureDefinitions. All of its settings are provided as command line parameters (rather than an appsettings.json file). In the future will probably adapt it to work on NDJSON files and live servers.

Installation

The package id is brianpos.fhir-distillery, and once installed the tool is run as fhir-distillery.

dotnet tool install --global brianpos.fhir-distillery

Usage

fhir-distillery --baseUrl http://fhir.example.org/ --publisher "My Organization" --scanFolder ./examples --outputPath ./OutputResources

One of --scanFolder or --serverUrl must be provided to indicate what to scan.

Licensing

HL7®, FHIR® and the FHIR Mark® are trademarks owned by Health Level Seven International, registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.