ruby-lint

ruby-lint is a linter and static code analysis tool for Ruby. It is inspired by similar tools such as jshint, flake8 and similar tools. ruby-lint primarily focuses on logic related errors such as the use of non existing variables instead of focusing on semantics (e.g. the amount of characters per line).

Requirements

• Ruby (MRI) 1.9.3 or newer
• a Unix based Operating System

Installation

The easiest way to install ruby-lint is to install it from RubyGems:

$ gem install ruby-lint

Alternatively you can install it from a RubyGems mirror that I run (updated daily and only mirrors a very small subset of RubyGems):

$ gem install --source=http://rubygems.yorickpeterse.com/

If you prefer to install (and build) ruby-lint from the source code you can do so as following:

$ git clone git://github.com/YorickPeterse/ruby-lint.git
$ cd ruby-lint
$ bundle install # you can also install the dependencies manually
$ rake gem

This builds a new version of the Gem and saves it in the pkg/ directory.

Security

To ensure that people can't tamper with the ruby-lint Gem once it's being distributed as a .gem file the Gem is signed using GNUPG (using the rubygems-openpgp Gem). If you have this Gem installed it's recommended that you install ruby-lint as following:

$ gem install ruby-lint --verify --trust

Unless you have my GPG public key and have marked it as trusted this process will fail. For signing Gems I use the public key 3649F444 registered to "Yorick Peterse" using Email address [email protected].

You can add this key by running the following command:

$ gpg --recv-keys 3649F444

In case you don't use GPG but still want some form of verification you can use the checksums that are located in the "checksum" directory. These checksums are SHA512 checksums of entire Gem files and can be verified using the sha512sum command.

Usage

Using ruby-lint from the CLI is very easy. To analyze a set of files you run the following:

$ ruby-lint file1.rb file2.rb

For more information specify either the -h or --help option.

Compatibility

For the time being ruby-lint only runs on MRI 1.9 due to its dependency on Ripper, a library that is not available on Rubinius, Jruby and other Ruby implementations.

In the future I intend to move away from Ripper but when this happens depends on when I can find something that suits my needs. Most existing solutions, such as ruby_parser lack features that I require (such as storing column numbers of AST nodes), are either unmaintained or severely limited in what they can do.

Documentation

• {file:contributing Contributing}
• {file:architecture Architecture}
• {file:code_analysis Code Analysis}
• {file:configuration Configuration}

Noteworthy constants:

• {RubyLint::Node}
• {RubyLint::Iterator}
• {RubyLint::Report}
• {RubyLint::Presenter::Text}

Helper modules:

• {RubyLint::Helper::ConstantPaths}
• {RubyLint::Helper::Conversion}
• {RubyLint::Helper::CurrentScope}
• {RubyLint::Helper::Methods}

License

All source code in this repository is licensed under the MIT license unless specified otherwise. A copy of this license can be found in the file "LICENSE" in the root directory of this repository.