zulip/docs/linters.md

Linters

Overview

Zulip does extensive linting of much of its source code, including Python/JavaScript files, HTML templates (Django/handlebars), CSS files, JSON fixtures, Markdown documents, puppet manifests, and shell scripts.

For some files we simply check for small things like trailing whitespace, but for other files, we are quite thorough about checking semantic correctness.

Obviously, a large reason for linting code is to enforce the Zulip coding standards. But we also use the linters to prevent common coding errors.

We borrow some open source tools for much of our linting, and the links below will direct you to the official documentation for these projects.

• eslint
• mypy
• puppet (puppet provides its own mechanism for validating manifests)
• pyflakes

Zulip also uses some home-grown code to perform tasks like validating indentation in template files, enforcing coding standards that are unique to Zulip, allowing certain errors from third party linters to pass through, and exempting legacy files from lint checks.

Running the linters

If you run ./tools/test-all, it will automatically run the linters (with one small exception: it does not run mypy against scripts).

You can also run them individually:

./tools/lint-all
./tools/run-mypy
./tools/run-mypy --scripts-only

Finally, you can rely on our Travis CI setup to run linters for you, but it is good practice to run lint checks locally.

Note: The linters only check files that git tracks. Remember to git add new files before running lint checks.

Our linting tools generally support the ability to lint files individually--with some caveats--and those options will be described later in this document.

We may eventually bundle run-mypy into lint-all, but mypy is pretty resource intensive compared to the rest of the linters, because it does static code analysis. So we keep mypy separate to allow folks to quickly run the other lint checks.

General considerations

Once you have read the Zulip coding guidelines, you can be pretty confident that 99% of the code that you write will pass through the linters fine, as long as you are thorough about keeping your code clean. And, of course, for minor oversights, lint-all is your friend, not your foe.

Occasionally, our linters will complain about things that are more of an artifact of the linter limitations than any actual problem with your code. There is usually a mechanism where you can bypass the linter in extreme cases, but often it can be a simple matter of writing your code in a slightly different style to appease the linter. If you have problems getting something to lint, you can submit an unfinished PR and ask the reviewer to help you work through the lint problem, or you can find other people in the Zulip Community to help you.

Also, bear in mind that 100% of the lint code is open source, so if you find limitations in either the Zulip home-grown stuff or our third party tools, feedback will be highly appreciated.

Finally, one way to clean up your code is to thoroughly exercise it with tests. The Zulip test documentation describes our test system in detail.

Lint checks

Most of our lint checks get performed by ./tools/lint-all. These include the following checks:

• Check Python code with pyflakes.
• Check JavaScript code with eslint.
• Check Python code for custom Zulip rules.
• Check non-Python code for custom Zulip rules.
• Check puppet manifests with the puppet validator.
• Check HTML templates for matching tags and indentations.
• Check CSS for parsability.
• Check JavaScript code for addClass calls.

The remaining lint checks occur in ./tools/run-mypy. It is probably somewhat of an understatement to call "mypy" a "linter," as it performs static code analysis of Python type annotations throughout our Python codebase.

Our documentation on using mypy covers mypy in more detail.

The rest of this document pertains to the checks that occur in ./tools/lint-all.

lint-all

Zulip has a script called lint-all that lives in our "tools" directory. It is the workhorse of our linting system, although in some cases it dispatches the heavy lifting to other components such as pyflakes, eslint, and other home grown tools.

You can find the source code here.

In order for our entire lint suite to run in a timely fashion, the lint-all script performs several lint checks in parallel by forking out subprocesses. This mechanism is still evolving, but you can look at the method run_parallel to get the gist of how it works.

Special options

You can use the -h option for lint-all to see its usage. One particular flag to take note of is the --modified flag, which enables you to only run lint checks against files that are modified in your git repo. Most of the "sub-linters" respect this flag, but some will continue to process all the files. Generally, a good workflow is to run with --modified when you are iterating on the code, and then run without that option right before commiting new code.

If you need to troubleshoot the linters, there is a --verbose option that can give you clues about which linters may be running slow, for example.

Lint checks

The next part of this document describes the lint checks that we apply to various file types.

Generic source code checks

We check almost our entire codebase for trailing whitespace. Also, we disallow tab (\t) characters in all but two files.

We also have custom regex-based checks that apply to specific file types. For relatively minor files like Markdown files and JSON fixtures, this is the extent of our checking.

Finally, we're checking line length in Python code (and hope to extend this to other parts of the codebase soon). You can use #ignorelinelength for special cases where a very long line makes sense (e.g. a link in a comment to an extremely long URL).

Python code

The bulk of our Python linting gets outsourced to the "pyflakes" tool. We call "pyflakes" in a fairly vanilla fashion, and then we post-process its output to exclude certain types of errors that Zulip is comfortable ignoring. (One notable class of error that Zulip currently tolerates is unused imports--because of the way mypy type annotations work in Python 2, it would be inconvenient to enforce this too strictly.)

Zulip also has custom regex-based rules that it applies to Python code. Look for python_rules in the source code for lint-all. Note that we provide a mechanism to exclude certain lines of codes from these checks. Often, it is simply the case that our regex approach is too crude to correctly exonerate certain valid constructs. In other cases, the code that we exempt may be deemed not worthwhile to fix.

JavaScript code

We check our JavaScript code in a few different ways:

• We run eslint.
• We perform custom Zulip regex checks on the code.
• We verify that all addClass calls, with a few exceptions, explicitly contain a CSS class.

The last check happens via a call to ./tools/find-add-class. This particular check is a work in progress, as we are trying to evolve a more rigorous system for weeding out legacy CSS styles, and the ability to quickly introspect our JS code for addClass calls is part of our vision.

Puppet manifests

We use Puppet as our tool to manage configuration files, using puppet "manifests." To lint puppet manifests, we use the "parser validate" option of puppet.

HTML Templates

Zulip uses two HTML templating systems:

• Django templates
• handlebars

Zulip has an internal tool that validates both types of templates for correct indentation and matching tags. You can find the code here:

• driver: check-templates
• engine: lib/template_parser.py

We exempt some legacy files from indentation checks, but we are hoping to clean those files up eventually.

CSS

Zulip does not currently lint its CSS for any kind of semantic correctness, but that is definitely a goal moving forward.

We do ensure that our home-grown CSS parser can at least parse the CSS code. This is a slightly more strict check than checking that the CSS is compliant to the official spec, as our parser will choke on unusual constructs that we probably want to avoid in our code, anyway. (When the parser chokes, the lint check will fail.)

You can find the code here:

• driver: check-css
• engine: lib/css_parser.py

Markdown, shell scripts, JSON fixtures

We mostly validate miscellaneous source files like .sh, .json, and .md files for whitespace issues.

Philosophy

If you want to help improve Zulip's system for linting, here are some considerations.

Speed

We want our linters to be fast enough that most developers will feel comfortable running them in a pre-commit hook, so we run our linters in parallel and support incremental checks.

Accuracy

We try to catch as many common mistakes as possible, either via a linter or an automated test.

Completeness

Our goal is to have most common style issues by caught by the linters, so new contributors to the codebase can efficiently fix produce code with correct style without needing to go back-and-forth with a reviewer.