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GolangCI-Lint

Build Status GolangCI License Release Docker

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. It supports go modules.

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

Follow the news and releases on our twitter and our blog.

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

Binary

Most installations are done for CI (e.g. Travis CI, CircleCI). 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 deprecated option --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 specific version of golangci-lint available on the releases page.

Here is the recommended way to install golangci-lint {{.LatestVersion}}:

# binary will be $(go env GOPATH)/bin/golangci-lint
curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golangci/golangci-lint/master/install.sh | sh -s -- -b $(go env GOPATH)/bin {{.LatestVersion}}

# or install it into ./bin/
curl -sSfL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golangci/golangci-lint/master/install.sh | sh -s {{.LatestVersion}}

# In alpine linux (as it does not come with curl by default)
wget -O- -nv https://raw.githubusercontent.com/golangci/golangci-lint/master/install.sh | sh -s {{.LatestVersion}}

golangci-lint --version

It is advised that you periodically update version of golangci-lint as the project is under active development and is constantly being improved. For any problems with golangci-lint, check out recent GitHub issues and update if needed.

macOS

You can also install a binary release on macOS using brew:

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

Docker

docker run --rm -v $(pwd):/app -w /app golangci/golangci-lint:{{.LatestVersion}} golangci-lint run -v

Go

Go source installations are supported for the two most recent Go releases.

GO111MODULE=on go get github.com/golangci/golangci-lint/cmd/golangci-lint@{{.LatestVersion}}

Trusted By

The following companies/products use golangci-lint:

The following great projects use 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 help linters
{{.LintersCommandOutputEnabledOnly}}

and the following linters are disabled by default:

$ golangci-lint help 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. Recommended settings for VS Code are:

    "go.lintTool":"golangci-lint",
"go.lintFlags": [
  "--fast"
]

    Using it in an editor without --fast can freeze your editor. Golangci-lint automatically discovers .golangci.yml config for edited file: you don't need to configure it in VS Code settings.

  2. Sublime Text - plugin for SublimeLinter.

  3. GoLand

    • Add File Watcher using existing golangci-lint template.
    • If your version of GoLand does not have the golangci-lint File Watcher template you can configure your own and use arguments run --disable=typecheck $FileDir$.

  4. GNU Emacs

  5. Vim

  6. Atom - go-plus supports golangci-lint.

Shell Completion

golangci-lint can generate bash completion file.

macOS

There are two versions of bash-completion, v1 and v2. V1 is for Bash 3.2 (which is the default on macOS), and v2 is for Bash 4.1+. The golangci-lint completion script doesn’t work correctly with bash-completion v1 and Bash 3.2. It requires bash-completion v2 and Bash 4.1+. Thus, to be able to correctly use golangci-lint completion on macOS, you have to install and use Bash 4.1+ (instructions). The following instructions assume that you use Bash 4.1+ (that is, any Bash version of 4.1 or newer).

Install bash-completion v2:

brew install bash-completion@2
echo 'export BASH_COMPLETION_COMPAT_DIR="/usr/local/etc/bash_completion.d"' >>~/.bashrc
echo '[[ -r "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh" ]] && . "/usr/local/etc/profile.d/bash_completion.sh"' >>~/.bashrc
exec bash # reload and replace (if it was updated) shell
type _init_completion && echo "completion is OK" # verify that bash-completion v2 is correctly installed

Add golangci-lint bash completion:

echo 'source <(golangci-lint completion bash)' >>~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

Linux

See kubectl instructions and don't forget to replace kubectl with golangci-lint.

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 26% 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 --timeout=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=gosec --enable=megacheck
$ gometalinter --deadline=30m --vendor --cyclo-over=30 --dupl-threshold=150 \
  --exclude=<default 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=gosec --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 33%
self-repo, 4 kLoC 12s 7.5x 1.2GB 41%
beego, 50 kLoC 10s 4.2x 1.4GB 9%
hugo, 70 kLoC 15s 6.1x 1.6GB 44%
consul, 127 kLoC 58s 4x 2.7GB 41%
terraform, 190 kLoC 2m13s 1.6x 4.8GB 0%
go-ethereum, 250 kLoC 33s 5x 3.6GB 0%
go source ($GOROOT/src), 1300 kLoC 2m45s 2x 4.7GB 0%

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 26% 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.

Memory Usage of Golangci-lint

A trade-off between memory usage and execution time can be controlled by GOGC environment variable. Less GOGC values trigger garbage collection more frequently and golangci-lint consumes less memory and more CPU. Below is the trade-off table for running on this repo:

GOGC Peak Memory, GB Executon Time, s
5 1.1 60
10 1.1 34
20 1.3 25
30 1.6 20.2
50 2.0 17.1
80 2.2 14.1
100 (default) 2.2 13.8
off 3.2 9.3

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 []*packages.Package by go/packages 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.

    • 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. Don't fork to run shell commands

All linters has their version fixed with go modules, they are builtin and you don't need to install them separately.

Supported Linters

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

golangci-lint help 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.

To see a list of enabled by your configuration linters:

golangci-lint linters

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}}

Custom Linters

Some people and organizations may choose to have custom made linters run as a part of golangci-lint. That functionality is supported through go's plugin library.

Create a Copy of golangci-lint that Can Run with Plugins

In order to use plugins, you'll need a golangci-lint executable that can run them. The normal version of this project is built with the vendors option, which breaks plugins that have overlapping dependencies.

  1. Download golangci-lint source code
  2. From the projects root directory, run make vendor_free_build
  3. Copy the golangci-lint executable that was created to your path, project, or other location

Configure Your Project for Linting

If you already have a linter plugin available, you can follow these steps to define it's usage in a projects .golangci.yml file. An example linter can be found at here. If you're looking for instructions on how to configure your own custom linter, they can be found further down.

  1. If the project you want to lint does not have one already, copy the .golangci.yml to the root directory.
  2. Adjust the yaml to appropriate linters-settings:custom entries as so:
linters-settings:
 custom:
  example:
   path: /example.so
   description: The description of the linter
   original-url: github.com/golangci/example-linter

That is all the configuration that is required to run a custom linter in your project. Custom linters are enabled by default, but abide by the same rules as other linters. If the disable all option is specified either on command line or in .golangci.yml files linters:disable-all: true, custom linters will be disabled; they can be re-enabled by adding them to the linters:enable list, or providing the enabled option on the command line, golangci-lint run -Eexample.

To Create Your Own Custom Linter

Your linter must implement one or more golang.org/x/tools/go/analysis.Analyzer structs. Your project should also use go.mod. All versions of libraries that overlap golangci-lint (including replaced libraries) MUST be set to the same version as golangci-lint. You can see the versions by running go version -m golangci-lint.

You'll also need to create a go file like plugin/example.go. This MUST be in the package main, and define a variable of name AnalyzerPlugin. The AnalyzerPlugin instance MUST implement the following interface:

type AnalyzerPlugin interface {
    GetAnalyzers() []*analysis.Analyzer
}

The type of AnalyzerPlugin is not important, but is by convention type analyzerPlugin struct {}. See plugin/example.go for more info.

To build the plugin, from the root project directory, run go build -buildmode=plugin plugin/example.go. This will create a plugin *.so file that can be copied into your project or another well known location for usage in golangci-lint.

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. Also, you can use issues.exclude-rules config option for per-path or per-linter configuration.
  2. Exclude this one issue by using special comment //nolint (see the section below).
  3. Exclude issues in path by run.skip-dirs, run.skip-files or issues.exclude-rules config options.

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.

Nolint

To exclude issues from all linters use //nolint. For example, if it's used inline (not from the beginning of the line) it excludes issues only for this line.

var bad_name int //nolint

To exclude issues from specific linters only:

var bad_name int //nolint:golint,unused

To exclude issues for the block of code use this directive on the beginning of a line:

//nolint
func allIssuesInThisFunctionAreExcluded() *string {
  // ...
}

//nolint:govet
var (
  a int
  b int
)

Also, you can exclude all issues in a file by:

//nolint:unparam
package pkg

You may add a comment explaining or justifying why //nolint is being used on the same line as the flag itself:

//nolint:gocyclo // This legacy function is complex but the team too busy to simplify it
func someLegacyFunction() *string {
  // ...
}

You can see more examples of using //nolint in our tests for it.

Use //nolint instead of // nolint because machine-readable comments should have no space by Go convention.

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=HEAD~1. Also, take a look at option --new, but consider that CI scripts that generate unstaged files will make --new only point out issues in those files and not in the last commit. In that regard --new-from-rev=HEAD~1 is safer. 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.

We don't recommend vendoring golangci-lint in your repo: you will get troubles updating golangci-lint. Please, use recommended way to install with the shell script: it's very fast.

Do I need to run go install?

No, you don't need to do it anymore.

Which go versions are supported Short answer: go 1.12 and newer are officially supported.

Long answer:

  1. go < 1.9 isn't supported
  2. go1.9 is officially supported by golangci-lint <= v1.10.2
  3. go1.10 is officially supported by golangci-lint <= 1.15.0.
  4. go1.11 is officially supported by golangci-lint <= 1.17.1.
  5. go1.12+ are officially supported by the latest version of golangci-lint (>= 1.18.0).

golangci-lint doesn't work

  1. Please, ensure you are using the latest binary release.
  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.

Why running with --fast is slow on the first run? Because the first run caches type information. All subsequent runs will be fast. Usually this options is used during development on local machine and compilation was already performed.

Thanks

Thanks to all contributors! 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}}

Changelog

{{.ChangeLog}}

Debug

You can see a verbose output of linter by using -v option.

If you would like to see more detailed logs you can set environment variable GL_DEBUG to debug golangci-lint. It's value is a list of debug tags. For example, GL_DEBUG=loader,gocritic golangci-lint run. Existing debug tags:

  1. gocritic - debug go-critic linter;
  2. env - debug go env command;
  3. loader - debug packages loading (including go/packages internal debugging);
  4. autogen_exclude - debug a filter excluding autogenerated source code;
  5. nolint - debug a filter excluding issues by //nolint comments.

Future Plans

  1. Upstream all changes of forked linters.
  2. Make it easy to write own linter/checker: it should take a minimum code, have perfect documentation, debugging and testing tooling.
  3. Speed up SSA loading: on-disk cache and existing code profiling-optimizing.
  4. Analyze (don't only filter) only new code: analyze only changed files and dependencies, make incremental analysis, caches.
  5. Smart new issues detector: don't print existing issues on changed lines.
  6. Minimize false-positives by fixing linters and improving testing tooling.
  7. Automatic issues fixing (code rewrite, refactoring) where it's possible.
  8. Documentation for every issue type.

Contact Information

Slack channel: #golangci-lint.

You can contact the author of GolangCI-Lint by [email protected]. Follow the news and releases on our twitter and our blog.

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