Stylelint

What is it?

Stylelint is a powerful and highly configurable linter for CSS and CSS preprocessors. A linter, short for “lint”, is a tool that analyzes source code for potential errors, style violations, and inconsistencies. Stylelint specifically focuses on enforcing coding styles and best practices for writing CSS code.

Stylelint can be integrated into various development environments and workflows, such as command-line usage, text editor plugins, build systems, and continuous integration (CI) pipelines. It supports a wide range of CSS syntaxes and preprocessors, including plain CSS, SCSS, Less, and CSS-in-JS libraries like styled-components.

Benefits of Stylelint

Consistent Coding Styles

Stylelint enforces consistent coding styles and conventions across projects or teams, improving code readability and maintainability.

Error Prevention

Stylelint identifies errors and problematic patterns in CSS code early on, helping prevent bugs and runtime issues.

Improved Code Quality

Stylelint promotes clean and efficient code structures, consistent naming conventions, and proper selector usage, enhancing overall code quality.

Time and Effort Savings

Stylelint’s automated fixing feature saves developers time and effort by automatically correcting style violations and formatting issues.

Customizability and Extensibility

Stylelint is highly customizable, allowing developers to configure rules and integrate custom rules or plugins to fit project-specific requirements.

Integration with Development Workflow

Stylelint seamlessly integrates with popular development tools, such as text editors, build systems, and CI pipelines, facilitating its integration into existing workflows and ensuring continuous code validation.

Install Stylelint

Execute the following command in your terminal

  npm install stylelint stylelint-config-standard-scss

Create a file named .stylelintrc.json in the root of your project to set up a basic configuration. Here is an example of how the configuration file can be structured.

  {
    "extends": ["stylelint-config-standard-scss"],
    "rules": {}
  }

If you need to learn more about Stylelint, please refer to the following resources: Stylelint documentation
Stylelint rules
stylelint-scss rules
stylelint-order

VS Code Extension

To enhance the integration of Stylelint, you can install the Stylelint extension if you are using VS Code as your code editor.

Code formatting and linting tools

Prettier

Prettier is a popular code formatting tool that automatically formats code to adhere to a consistent style. It supports various programming languages, including JavaScript, TypeScript, CSS, HTML, and more. Prettier eliminates the need for manual formatting decisions by applying a set of opinionated rules. It ensures consistent indentation, line wrapping, spacing, and other formatting aspects. Prettier can be easily integrated into different development workflows, including text editors, build systems, and CI pipelines, making it a valuable tool for improving code readability and maintaining consistent code styles across projects.

To learn more about this tool, I recommend referring to the documentation for further information.

lint-staged

lint-staged is a tool that allows developers to run linters or code formatters on staged files, which are files that have been modified and are about to be committed to a version control system. It works by running specified scripts or commands on the staged files, providing a way to perform selective linting or formatting only on the relevant changes. lint-staged is commonly used in conjunction with Git hooks and is particularly useful for optimizing code linting and formatting processes, ensuring that only the necessary files are checked and avoiding unnecessary linting tasks on the entire codebase. By focusing on staged files, lint-staged helps developers maintain code quality while minimizing the impact on development speed and efficiency.

For more detailed information about this tool, refer to its documentation.