Class ArcanistLintEngine

Manages lint execution. When you run 'arc lint' or 'arc diff', Arcanist checks your .arcconfig to see if you have specified a lint engine in the key "lint.engine". The engine must extend this class. For example:

lang=js { ... "lint.engine" : "ExampleLintEngine", ... }

The lint engine is given a list of paths (generally, the paths that you modified in your change) and determines which linters to run on them. The linters themselves are responsible for actually analyzing file text and finding warnings and errors. For example, if the modified paths include some JS files and some Python files, you might want to run JSLint on the JS files and PyLint on the Python files.

You can also run multiple linters on a single file. For instance, you might run one linter on all text files to make sure they don't have trailing whitespace, or enforce tab vs space rules, or make sure there are enough curse words in them.

Because lint engines are pretty custom to the rules of a project, you will generally need to build your own. Fortunately, it's pretty easy (and you can use the prebuilt linters, you just need to write a little glue code to tell Arcanist which linters to run). For a simple example of how to build a lint engine, see ExampleLintEngine.

You can test an engine like this:

arc lint --engine ExampleLintEngine --lintall some_file.py

...which will show you all the lint issues raised in the file.

See Arcanist User Guide: Customizing Lint, Unit Tests and Workflows for more information about configuring lint engines.