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GolangCI-Lint

Build Status

GolangCI-Lint is a linters aggregator. It's fast: on average 5 times faster than gometalinter. It's easy to integrate and use, has nice output and has a minimum number of false positives.

GolangCI-Lint has integrations with VS Code, GNU Emacs, Sublime Text.

Sponsored by GolangCI.com: SaaS service for running linters on Github pull requests. Free for Open Source.

Demo

Short 1.5 min video demo of analyzing beego. asciicast

Install

CI Installation

Most installations are done for CI (travis, circleci etc). It's important to have reproducible CI: don't start to fail all builds at the same time. With golangci-lint this can happen if you use --enable-all and a new linter is added or even without --enable-all: when one upstream linter is upgraded.

It's highly recommended to install a fixed version of golangci-lint. Releases are available on the releases page.

The recommended way to install golangci-lint (replace vX.Y.Z with the latest version from the releases page):

# binary will be $GOPATH/bin/golangci-lint
curl -sfL https://install.goreleaser.com/github.com/golangci/golangci-lint.sh | bash -s -- -b $GOPATH/bin vX.Y.Z

# or install it into ./bin/
# curl -sfL https://install.goreleaser.com/github.com/golangci/golangci-lint.sh | bash -s vX.Y.Z

# golangci-lint --version

Periodically update version of golangci-lint: the project is under active development and is constantly being improved. But please always check for newly found issues and update if needed.

Local Installation

It's a not recommended for your CI pipeline. Only install like this for your local development environment.

go get -u github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint

You can also install it on OSX using brew:

brew install golangci/tap/golangci-lint
brew upgrade golangci/tap/golangci-lint

Quick Start

To run golangci-lint execute:

golangci-lint run

It's an equivalent of executing:

golangci-lint run ./...

You can choose which directories and files to analyze:

golangci-lint run dir1 dir2/... dir3/file1.go

Directories are NOT analyzed recursively. To analyze them recursively append /... to their path.

GolangCI-Lint can be used with zero configuration. By default the following linters are enabled:

$ golangci-lint linters
{{.LintersCommandOutputEnabledOnly}}

and the following linters are disabled by default:

$ golangci-lint linters
...
{{.LintersCommandOutputDisabledOnly}}

Pass -E/--enable to enable linter and -D/--disable to disable:

$ golangci-lint run --disable-all -E errcheck

Editor Integration

  1. Go for Visual Studio Code.
  2. Sublime Text - plugin for SublimeLinter.
  3. GoLand
  • Configure File Watcher with arguments run --print-issued-lines=false $FileDir$.
  • Predefined File Watcher will be added in issue.
  1. GNU Emacs - flycheck checker.
  2. Vim

Comparison

golangci-lint vs gometalinter

GolangCI-Lint was created to fix the following issues with gometalinter:

  1. Slow work: gometalinter usually works for minutes in average projects. GolangCI-Lint works 2-7x times faster by reusing work.
  2. Huge memory consumption: parallel linters don't share the same program representation and can consume n times more memory (n - concurrency). GolangCI-Lint fixes it by sharing representation and consumes 1.35x less memory.
  3. Doesn't use real bounded concurrency: if you set it to n it can take up to n*n threads because of forced threads in specific linters. gometalinter can't do anything about it because it runs linters as black boxes in forked processes. In GolangCI-Lint we run all linters in one process and completely control them. Configured concurrency will be correctly bounded. This issue is important because you often want to set concurrency to the CPUs count minus one to ensure you do not freeze your PC and be able to work on it while analyzing code.
  4. Lack of nice output. We like how the gcc and clang compilers format their warnings: using colors, printing warning lines and showing the position in line.
  5. Too many issues. GolangCI-Lint cuts a lot of issues by using default exclude list of common false-positives. By default, it has enabled smart issues processing: merge multiple issues for one line, merge issues with the same text or from the same linter. All of these smart processors can be configured by the user.
  6. Integration into large codebases. A good way to start using linters in a large project is not to fix a plethora of existing issues, but to set up CI and fix only issues in new commits. You can use revgrep for it, but it's yet another utility to install and configure. With golangci-lint it's much easier: revgrep is already built into golangci-lint and you can use it with one option (-n, --new or --new-from-rev).
  7. Installation. With gometalinter, you need to run a linters installation step. It's easy to forget this step and end up with stale linters. It also complicates CI setup. GolangCI-Lint requires no installation of linters.
  8. Yaml or toml config. Gometalinter's JSON isn't convenient for config files.

golangci-lint vs Running Linters Manually

  1. It will be much slower because golangci-lint runs all linters in parallel and shares 50-80% of linters work.
  2. It will have less control and more false-positives: some linters can't be properly configured without hacks.
  3. It will take more time because of different usages and need of tracking of versions of n linters.

Performance

Benchmarks were executed on MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), 2,4 GHz Intel Core i5, 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3. It has 4 cores and concurrent linting as a default consuming all cores. Benchmark was run (and measured) automatically, see the code here (BenchmarkWithGometalinter).

We measure peak memory usage (RSS) by tracking of processes RSS every 5 ms.

Comparison with gometalinter

We compare golangci-lint and gometalinter in default mode, but explicitly enable all linters because of small differences in the default configuration.

$ golangci-lint run --no-config --issues-exit-code=0 --deadline=30m \
	--disable-all --enable=deadcode  --enable=gocyclo --enable=golint --enable=varcheck \
	--enable=structcheck --enable=maligned --enable=errcheck --enable=dupl --enable=ineffassign \
	--enable=interfacer --enable=unconvert --enable=goconst --enable=gas --enable=megacheck
$ gometalinter --deadline=30m --vendor --cyclo-over=30 --dupl-threshold=150 \
	--exclude=<defaul golangci-lint excludes> --skip=testdata --skip=builtin \
	--disable-all --enable=deadcode  --enable=gocyclo --enable=golint --enable=varcheck \
	--enable=structcheck --enable=maligned --enable=errcheck --enable=dupl --enable=ineffassign \
	--enable=interfacer --enable=unconvert --enable=goconst --enable=gas --enable=megacheck
	./...
Repository GolangCI Time GolangCI Is Faster than Gometalinter GolangCI Memory GolangCI eats less memory than Gometalinter
gometalinter repo, 4 kLoC 6s 6.4x 0.7GB 1.5x
self-repo, 4 kLoC 12s 7.5x 1.2GB 1.7x
beego, 50 kLoC 10s 4.2x 1.4GB 1.1x
hugo, 70 kLoC 15s 6.1x 1.6GB 1.8x
consul, 127 kLoC 58s 4x 2.7GB 1.7x
terraform, 190 kLoC 2m13s 1.6x 4.8GB 1x
go-ethereum, 250 kLoC 33s 5x 3.6GB 1x
go source ($GOROOT/src), 1300 kLoC 2m45s 2x 4.7GB 1x

On average golangci-lint is 4.6 times faster than gometalinter. Maximum difference is in the self-repo: 7.5 times faster, minimum difference is in terraform source code repo: 1.8 times faster.

On average golangci-lint consumes 1.35 times less memory.

Why golangci-lint is faster

Golangci-lint directly calls linters (no forking) and reuses 80% of work by parsing program only once. Read this section for details.

Internals

  1. Work sharing The key difference with gometalinter is that golangci-lint shares work between specific linters (golint, govet, ...). We don't fork to call specific linter but use its API. For small and medium projects 50-90% of work between linters can be reused.

    • load loader.Program once

      We load program (parsing all files and type-checking) only once for all linters. For the most of linters it's the most heavy operation: it takes 5 seconds on 8 kLoC repo and 11 seconds on $GOROOT/src.

    • build ssa.Program once

      Some linters (megacheck, interfacer, unparam) work on SSA representation. Building of this representation takes 1.5 seconds on 8 kLoC repo and 6 seconds on $GOROOT/src. SSA representation is used from a fork of go-tools, not the official one.

    • parse source code and build AST once

      Parsing one source file takes 200 us on average. Parsing of all files in $GOROOT/src takes 2 seconds. Currently we parse each file more than once because it's not the bottleneck. But we already save a lot of extra parsing. We're planning to parse each file only once.

    • walk files and directories once

      It takes 300-1000 ms for $GOROOT/src.

  2. Smart linters scheduling

    We schedule linters by a special algorithm which takes estimated execution time into account. It allows to save 10-30% of time when one of heavy linters (megacheck etc) is enabled.

  3. Improved program loading

    We smartly use setting TypeCheckFuncBodies in loader.Config to build loader.Program. If there are no linters requiring SSA enabled we can load dependencies of analyzed code much faster by not analyzing their functions: we analyze only file-level declarations. It makes program loading 10-30% faster in such cases.

  4. Don't fork to run shell commands

All linters are vendored in the /vendor folder: their version is fixed, they are builtin and you don't need to install them separately.

Trusted By

The following great projects use golangci-lint:

Supported Linters

To see a list of supported linters and which linters are enabled/disabled:

golangci-lint linters

Enabled By Default Linters

{{.EnabledByDefaultLinters}}

Disabled By Default Linters (-E/--enable)

{{.DisabledByDefaultLinters}}

Configuration

The config file has lower priority than command-line options. If the same bool/string/int option is provided on the command-line and in the config file, the option from command-line will be used. Slice options (e.g. list of enabled/disabled linters) are combined from the command-line and config file.

Command-Line Options

golangci-lint run -h
{{.RunHelpText}}

Config File

GolangCI-Lint looks for config files in the following paths from the current working directory:

  • .golangci.yml
  • .golangci.toml
  • .golangci.json

GolangCI-Lint also searches for config files in all directories from the directory of the first analyzed path up to the root. To see which config file is being used and where it was sourced from run golangci-lint with -v option.

Config options inside the file are identical to command-line options. You can configure specific linters' options only within the config file (not the command-line).

There is a .golangci.example.yml example config file with all supported options, their description and default value:

{{.GolangciYamlExample}}

It's a .golangci.yml config file of this repo: we enable more linters than the default and have more strict settings:

{{.GolangciYaml}}

False Positives

False positives are inevitable, but we did our best to reduce their count. For example, we have a default enabled set of exclude patterns. If a false positive occurred you have the following choices:

  1. Exclude issue by text using command-line option -e or config option issues.exclude. It's helpful when you decided to ignore all issues of this type.
  2. Exclude this one issue by using special comment // nolint[:linter1,linter2,...] on issued line. Comment // nolint disables all issues reporting on this line. Comment e.g. // nolint:govet disables only govet issues for this line. If you would like to completely exclude all issues for some function prepend this comment above function:
//nolint
func f() {
  ...
}

Please create GitHub Issues here if you find any false positives. We will add it to the default exclude list if it's common or we will fix underlying linter.

FAQ

How do you add a custom linter?

You can integrate it yourself, see this wiki page with documentation. Or you can create a GitHub Issue and we will integrate when time permits.

It's cool to use golangci-lint when starting a project, but what about existing projects with large codebase? It will take days to fix all found issues

We are sure that every project can easily integrate golangci-lint, even the large one. The idea is to not fix all existing issues. Fix only newly added issue: issues in new code. To do this setup CI (or better use GolangCI to run golangci-lint with option --new-from-rev=origin/master. Also, take a look at option -n. By doing this you won't create new issues in your code and can choose fix existing issues (or not).

How to use golangci-lint in CI (Continuous Integration)?

You have 2 choices:

  1. Use GolangCI: this service is highly integrated with GitHub (issues are commented in the pull request) and uses a golangci-lint tool. For configuration use .golangci.yml (or toml/json).
  2. Use custom CI: just run golangci-lint in CI and check the exit code. If it's non-zero - fail the build. The main disadvantage is that you can't see issues in pull request code and would need to view the build log, then open the referenced source file to see the context. If you'd like to vendor golangci-lint in your repo, run:
go get -u github.com/golang/dep/cmd/dep
dep init
dep ensure -v -add github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint

Then add these lines to your Gopkg.toml file, so dep ensure -update won't delete the vendored golangci-lint code.

required = [
  "github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint",
]

In your CI scripts, install the vendored golangci-lint like this:

go install ./vendor/github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint/

Vendoring golangci-lint saves a network request, potentially making your CI system a little more reliable.

Does I need to run go install?

No, you don't need to do it anymore. We will run go install -i and go test -i for analyzed packages ourselves. We will run them only if option govet.use-installed-packages is true.

golangci-lint doesn't work

  1. Update it: go get -u github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint
  2. Run it with -v option and check the output.
  3. If it doesn't help create a GitHub issue with the output from the error and #2 above.

Thanks

Thanks to alecthomas/gometalinter for inspiration and amazing work. Thanks to bradleyfalzon/revgrep for cool diff tool.

Thanks to developers and authors of used linters: {{.ThanksList}}

Future Plans

  1. Upstream all changes of forked linters.
  2. Fully integrate all used linters: make a common interface and reuse 100% of what can be reused: AST traversal, packages preparation etc.
  3. Make it easy to write own linter/checker: it should take a minimum code, have perfect documentation, debugging and testing tooling.
  4. Speed up package loading (dig into loader): on-disk cache and existing code profiling-optimizing.
  5. Analyze (don't only filter) only new code: analyze only changed files and dependencies, make incremental analysis, caches.
  6. Smart new issues detector: don't print existing issues on changed lines.
  7. Integration with Text Editors. On-the-fly code analysis for text editors: it should be super-fast.
  8. Minimize false-positives by fixing linters and improving testing tooling.
  9. Automatic issues fixing (code rewrite, refactoring) where it's possible.
  10. Documentation for every issue type.

Changelog

There is the most valuable changes log:

June 2018

  1. Add support of the next linters:
    • unparam
    • misspell
    • nakedret
    • lll
    • depguard
  2. Smart generated files detector
  3. Full //nolint support
  4. Implement --skip-files and --skip-dirs options
  5. Checkstyle output format support

May 2018

  1. Support GitHub Releases
  2. Installation via Homebrew and Docker

Contact Information

You can contact the author of GolangCI-Lint by denis@golangci.com.