elint has been deprecated. Instead of using it directly, Elisp projects such as straight.el, el-patch, prescient.el, and diary-manager maintain their own build tooling.

The remainder of this README is included for historical value only.

First, obtain the elint binary. The recommended way to do this is to add this repository as a submodule into your project. Then, you may invoke one or more tasks as follows:

$ path/to/elint <task>...

But first, you have to define your tasks. You do this by creating a checkers directory, and placing a file called dispatch inside it. The dispatch file is a bash script that is executed by elint to define your tasks. Here is an example:

task longlines *.md checkers/* checkers-self/* elint elint-file
task shellcheck elint elint-file
task shellcheck-bash checkers/*
task toc README.md

There are two functions you can call here, task and custom_task. The syntax is as follows:

task <name> <glob>...
custom_task <name> <checker> <glob>...

The difference is that with task, your task will default to running a checker of the same name as the task, whereas custom_task allows you to specify a task that runs any checker.

Don't worry about word splitting: it's disabled by elint while loading the dispatch file.

You can get started right away like this, since elint comes with a few checkers already defined: for example, checkdoc, compile, shellcheck, and toc. These checkers are all defined in the checkers directory of this repository.

But you can also define your own checkers, by placing additional files in your own checkers directory. A checker is a bash script sourced by elint; it is passed a filename as a single argument (one of the filenames defined by the task). If it produces any output, on either stdout or stderr, that means the check failed. The output will be reported by elint in a dedicated section. For example, in the checkers-self directory of this repository, you can see that elint defines a custom checker shellcheck-bash for itself.

Speaking of checkers-self, this is actually the checkers directory that elint defines for itself. Normally, this directory would have to be called checkers, but there is an option to call it something else (which is what elint has to do, since it already has a checkers directory). Just create a .elintrc file in the directory from which you invoke elint. That file is a bash script that is sourced when elint starts up, and it allows you to set some environment variables. Here is an example .elintrc, which is used by elint itself:

ELINT_CHECKERS_DIR=checkers-self

Generally speaking it is convenient to invoke elint using make. This way, you don't have to worry about your working directory, and you can also define convenient grouping of tasks (for example, a group of all tasks, or a group of tasks to be run on your CI server). Here is an example Makefile:

.PHONY: all
all:
    @./elint longlines shellcheck toc

.PHONY: travis
travis:
    @./elint longlines shellcheck

.PHONY: longlines
longlines:
    @./elint longlines

.PHONY: shellcheck
shellcheck:
    @./elint shellcheck shellcheck-bash

.PHONY: toc
toc:
    @./elint toc