Javascript Linting…

Suffice to say, my minions write a quantity of Javascript. And testing it isn’t all that easy. While rummaging the internet, I came across @NeilCrosby‘s FrontEndTestSuite which aims to automate e.g. w3c validator checks and so on – there will be more on that later I suspect once I get it working.

Anyway, the first part I wanted to do is to run a Javascript linter on things…. as I haven’t really come across these before.

I’ve found two approaches :

Install JavascriptLint

see http://www.javascriptlint.com/download.htm

Build instructions for the lazy – uncompress/extract the files from the archive, then :

  1. cd jsl-0.3.0/src
  2. make -f Makefile.ref
  3. cp Linux_All_DBG.OBJ/jsl /usr/local/bin

Usage looks a bit like :

jsl -process $file

As per the ‘help’ documentation, it returns different exit codes depending how things went (e.g. 0 – everything good; 1 – warnings etc).

Aside from the annoying compile step, this seemed the easiest to setup, and friendliest to use from the command line.

Mozilla’s Rhino & JSLint.js

This is the approach expected by Neil’s TestSuite above (more soon, perhaps).

Download the Mozilla Rhino thing – for me this is a simple ‘apt-get install rhino‘ YMMV.

  1. export CLASSPATH=/usr/share/java/js.jar
  2. java org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main /path/to/some/javascript.js

Again, this will give some sort of return error code if it can’t parse it – but it’s not yet running through jslint… which is what we really want.

Firstly, download JSLint.js via https://github.com/douglascrockford/JSLint/blob/master/fulljslint.js (click on the ‘raw’ button)…

  1. (Requires CLASSPATH thing from above)
  2. java org.mozilla.javascript.tools.shell.Main
  3. load(‘fulljslint.js’);
  4. to_test = readFile(‘/path/to/javascript/file/to/test.js’);
  5. result = JSLINT(to_test, null);

If ‘result’ is ‘false’ then you can inspect the errors via JSLINT.errors.

Next up, getting frontend-test-suite running, or something based upon it….


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