Linting your Open Source Repository

Chris Aniszczyk — Thu, 13 Feb 2020 01:00:23 +0000

Have you ever wanted to lint your open source repository for common issues at build time... such as a missing LICENSE, SECURITY.md CONTRIBUTING.md or even absent source license headers? There is a tool built by the TODO Group called repolinter that tackles this problem:

todogroup / repolinter

Repolinter, The Open Source Repository Linter

Lint open source repositories for common issues.

Installation

Repolinter requires Node.JS >= v12 to function properly. Once Node.JS is installed, you can install Repolinter using npm:

npm install -g repolinter

Linting a Local Repository

Once installed, run the following to lint a directory:

repolinter lint <directory>

The above command will lint <directory> with the local repolinter.json ruleset or the default ruleset if none is found:

repolinter % repolinter lint .
Target directory: <directory>
Lint:
✔ license-file-exists: Found file (LICENSE)
✔ readme-file-exists: Found file (README.md)
✔ contributing-file-exists: Found file (CONTRIBUTING)
✔ code-of-conduct-file-exists: Found file (CODE-OF-CONDUCT)
✔ changelog-file-exists: Found file (CHANGELOG)
...
repolinter % echo $?
0

Linting a Remote Repository

Repolinter also supports linting a git repository using the --git flag. With this flag enabled, the directory input will be interpreted as a git URL which Repolinter will automatically clone into a temporary directory.

repolinter lint -g https://github.com/todogroup/repolinter.git

…

View on GitHub

It's as simple as running 'npx repolinter' against a repository:

You can decide what rules to run against your repository:

You can also build custom rules for your project, for example, this pull request added a rule to check for security policies (SECURITY.md):

Add check for security policies #146

caniszczyk posted on Sep 14, 2019

https://help.github.com/en/articles/adding-a-security-policy-to-your-repository

Signed-off-by: Chris Aniszczyk caniszczyk@gmail.com