webinstall.dev/jshint Star on GitHub

To update or switch versions, run npm install -g jshint@latest (or @v2, etc).

Files

These are the files / directories that are created and/or modified with this install:

~/.config/envman/PATH.env
~/.local/opt/node
~/.jshintrc.defaults.json5
~/.jshintrc.webi.json5

Cheat Sheet

JSHint is a community-driven tool that detects errors and potential problems in JavaScript code. The project aims to help JavaScript developers write complex programs without worrying about typos and language gotchas. - jshint.com/about/

jshint works best when it's integrated with your editor - such as vim (with vim-ale) or VS Code. However, you can also use it from the CLI.

Here we'll cover how to:

• set defaults
• pick the best settings
• check all files in a project
• ignore certain file patterns
• apply overrides for specific files

Check out the official docs at https://jshint.com/docs/cli/ for more info.

How to set JSHint's defaults

JSHint is meant to be configure per-project.

You should put a .jshintrc in the root of the repository of each of your projects.

You can copy our recommended settings into your project directory by running this command:

# convert from JSON5 (with comments) to JSON and copy into current directory
sed -e 's://.*::g' \
    ~/.jshintrc.webi.json5 \
    > .jshintrc

The .jshintrc will be read by code tools such as vim-ale and VS Code

What are the best settings?

The primary value of tools like JSHint is that they allow you to restrict what you use in the language from "everything that could every be useful" down to just "safe features that don't cause bugs".

Given that, JSHint is perhaps a little too "flexible" - whereas its primary competitor (JSLint) is perhaps a little too inflexible - but if you follow that general methodology, you'll do well.

These are the settings we think strike the right balance for Software Engineering (as opposed to just Code Monkey-ing around):

// ~/.jshintrc.webi.json5
// Recommended config from https://webinstall.dev/jshint
//
// To copy this file into your project without comments, run this:
//     sed -e 's://.*::g' ~/.jshintrc.webi.json5 > .jshintrc

{
  browser: true,
  node: true,
  esversion: 11,
  curly: true,
  sub: true,

  // More strict
  bitwise: true,
  eqeqeq: true,
  forin: true,
  freeze: true,
  immed: true,
  latedef: 'nofunc',
  nonbsp: true,
  nonew: true,
  plusplus: true,
  undef: true,
  unused: 'vars',
  strict: true,
  maxdepth: 4,
  maxstatements: 100,
  maxcomplexity: 20,
}

That file is installed to ~/.jshintrc.webi.json5, and should look pretty similar to the above, assuming that we've kept it in sync with this README.

The list of JSHint's default options can be found here: https://github.com/jshint/jshint/blob/master/examples/.jshintrc

How to check project files with jshint

Give jshint a list of files and/or directories to check .js files:

jshint ./

How to make jshint ignore certain files

Create a .jshintignore to tell JSHint which files to ignore every time

echo "dist/" >> .jshintignore

How to apply different settings to different files

You can use the overrides directive to specify different rules to apply to certain file patterns and directories.

{
  esversion: 11,
  overrides: {
    './browser/*.js': {
      esversion: 7,
    },
  },
}