SCSS-Lint

scss-lint is a tool to help keep your SCSS files clean and readable. You can run it manually from the command-line, or integrate it into your SCM hooks.

• Requirements
• Installation
• Usage
• Configuration
• Formatters
• Exit Status Codes
• Linters
• Editor Integration
• Git Integration
• Rake Integration
• Maven Integration
• Documentation
• Contributing
• Changelog
• License

Requirements

• Ruby 1.9.3+
• Sass 3.4.1+ (scss-lint 0.27.0 was the last version to support Sass 3.3)
• Files you wish to lint must be written in SCSS (not Sass) syntax

Installation

gem install scss-lint

Usage

Run scss-lint from the command-line by passing in a directory (or multiple directories) to recursively scan:

scss-lint app/assets/stylesheets/

You can also specify a list of files explicitly:

scss-lint app/assets/stylesheets/**/*.css.scss

scss-lint will output any problems with your SCSS, including the offending filename and line number (if available).

Command Line Flag	Description
-c/--config	Specify a configuration file to use
-e/--exclude	Exclude one or more files from being linted
-f/--format	Output format (see Formatters)
-o/--out	Write output to a file instead of STDOUT
-r/--require	Require file/library (mind $LOAD_PATH, uses Kernel.require)
-i/--include-linter	Specify which linters you specifically want to run
-x/--exclude-linter	Specify which linters you don't want to run
-h/--help	Show command line flag documentation
--show-formatters	Show all available formatters
--show-linters	Show all available linters
-v/--version	Show version

Configuration

scss-lint will automatically load the file .scss-lint.yml if one exists in the current working directory merging it with the default configuration. Otherwise, it uses the default configuration as-is.

You can also specify that a specific configuration file be used via the --config flag. It will still be merged with the default configuration.

Here's an example configuration file:

scss_files: 'app/assets/stylesheets/**/*.css.scss'

exclude: 'app/assets/stylesheets/plugins/**'

linters:
  BorderZero:
    enabled: false

  Indentation:
    exclude:
      - 'path/to/file.scss'
      - 'path/to/directory/**'
    severity: warning
    width: 2

All linters have an enabled option which can be true or false, which controls whether the linter is run, along with linter-specific options. The defaults are defined in config/default.yml.

Severities

The severity option allows you to specify whether the lint should be treated as a warning or an error. Warnings cause scss-lint to exit with a different error code than errors (unless both warnings and errors are present, in which case the error exit code is returned). This is useful when integrating scss-lint with build systems or other executables, as you can rely on its exit status code to indicate whether a lint actually requires attention.

Excluding Files

The exclude directive allows you to specify a glob pattern of files that should not be linted by scss-lint. Paths are relative to the location of the config file itself if they are not absolute paths. If an inherited file specifies the exclude directive, the two exclusion lists are combined. Any additional exclusions specified via the --exclude flag are also combined. If you need to exclude files for a single linter you can specify the list of files using the linter's exclude configuration option.

Generating a Configuration

To start using scss-lint you can use the Config Formatter, which will generate an .scss-lint.yml configuration file with all linters which caused a lint disabled. Starting with this as your configuration you can slowly enable each linter and fix any lints one by one.

Disabling Linters via Source

For special cases where a particular lint doesn't make sense in a specific area of a file, special inline comments can be used to enable/disable linters. Some examples are provided below:

Disable for the entire file

// scss-lint:disable BorderZero
p {
  border: none; // No lint reported
}

Disable a few linters

// scss-lint:disable BorderZero, StringQuotes
p {
  border: none; // No lint reported
  content: "hello"; // No lint reported
}

Disable all lints within a block (and all contained blocks)

p {
  // scss-lint:disable BorderZero
  border: none; // No lint reported
}

a {
  border: none; // Lint reported
}

Disable and enable again

// scss-lint:disable BorderZero
p {
  border: none; // No lint reported
}
// scss-lint:enable BorderZero

a {
  border: none; // Lint reported
}

Disable/enable all linters

// scss-lint:disable all
p {
  border: none; // No lint reported
}
// scss-lint:enable all

a {
  border: none; // Lint reported
}

Formatters

Default

The default formatter is intended to be easy to consume by both humans and external tools.

scss-lint [scss-files...]

test.scss:2 [W] StringQuotes: Prefer single quoted strings
test.scss:2 [W] Indentation: Line should be indented 0 spaces, but was indented 1 space
test.scss:5 [W] StringQuotes: Prefer single quoted strings
test.scss:6 [W] UrlQuotes: URLs should be enclosed in quotes

The default formatter tries to colorize the output using Rainbow, which will silently fail on Windows systems if the gems windows-pr and win32console are not installed. Read more about adding Windows support.

Config

Returns a valid .scss-lint.yml configuration where all linters which caused a lint are disabled. Starting with this as your configuration, you can slowly enable each linter and fix any lints one by one.

scss-lint --format=Config [scss-files...]

linters:
  Indentation:
    enabled: false
  StringQuotes:
    enabled: false
  UrlQuotes:
    enabled: false

Files

Useful when you just want to open all offending files in an editor. This will just output the names of the files so that you can execute the following to open them all:

scss-lint --format=Files [scss-files...] | xargs vim

JSON

Outputs JSON with filenames and an array of issue objects.

{
  "test.css": [
    {"line": 2, "severity": "warning", "reason": "Prefer single quoted strings"},
    {"line": 2, "severity": "warning", "reason": "Line should be indented 0 spaces, but was indented 1 spaces"},
    {"line": 5, "severity": "warning", "reason": "Prefer single quoted strings"},
    {"line": 6, "severity": "warning", "reason": "URLs should be enclosed in quotes"}
  ]
}

XML

Outputs XML with <lint>, <file>, and <issue> tags.

scss-lint --format=XML [scss-files...]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<lint>
  <file name="test.css">
    <issue line="2" severity="warning" reason="Prefer single quoted strings" />
    <issue line="2" severity="warning" reason="Line should be indented 0 spaces, but was indented 1 spaces" />
    <issue line="5" severity="warning" reason="Prefer single quoted strings" />
    <issue line="6" severity="warning" reason="URLs should be enclosed in quotes" />
  </file>
</lint>

Plugins

There are also formatters that integrate with third-party tools which are available as plugins.

Checkstyle

Outputs an XML document with <checkstyle>, <file>, and <error> tags. Suitable for consumption by tools like Jenkins with the Checkstyle plugin.

gem install scss_lint_reporter_checkstyle
scss-lint --require=scss_lint_reporter_checkstyle --format=Checkstyle [scss-files...]

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<checkstyle version="1.5.6">
  <file name="test.css">
    <error line="2" severity="warning" message="Prefer single quoted strings" />
    <error line="2" severity="warning" message="Line should be indented 0 spaces, but was indented 1 spaces" />
    <error line="5" severity="warning" message="Prefer single quoted strings" />
    <error line="6" severity="warning" message="URLs should be enclosed in quotes" />
  </file>
</checkstyle>

Exit Status Codes

scss-lint tries to use semantic exit statuses wherever possible, but the full list of codes and the conditions under which they are returned is listed here for completeness.

Exit Status	Description
0	No lints were found
1	Lints with a severity of warning were reported (no errors)
2	One or more errors were reported (and any number of warnings)
64	Command line usage error (invalid flag, etc.)
66	One or more files specified were not found
69	Required library specified via -r/--require flag was not found
70	Unexpected error (i.e. a bug); please report it
78	Invalid configuration file; your YAML is likely incorrect
80	Files glob patterns specified did not match any files.
81	All files specified were filtered by exclusions (e.g. via --exclude flag or the exclude option in your configuration).

Linters

scss-lint is a customizable tool with opinionated defaults that helps you enforce a consistent style in your SCSS. For these opinionated defaults, we've had to make calls about what we think are the "best" style conventions, even when there are often reasonable arguments for more than one possible style.

Should you want to customize the checks run against your code, you can do so by editing your configuration file to match your preferred style.

###» Linters Documentation

Editor Integration

Vim

You can have scss-lint automatically run against your SCSS files after saving by using the Syntastic plugin. If you already have the plugin, just add let g:syntastic_scss_checkers = ['scss_lint'] to your .vimrc.

IntelliJ

Install the SCSS Lint plugin for IntelliJ

Sublime Text

Install the Sublime scss-lint plugin.

Atom

Install the Atom scss-lint plugin. It is a part of the atomlinter project, so if you are already using other linter plugins, you can keep them in one place.

Emacs

Install and enable both scss-mode and flycheck-mode. You can enable automatic linting for scss-mode buffers with (add-hook 'scss-mode-hook 'flycheck-mode) in your init.el.

Git Integration

If you'd like to integrate scss-lint into your Git workflow, check out our Git hook manager, overcommit.

Rake Integration

To execute scss-lint via a Rake task, add the following to your Rakefile:

require 'scss_lint/rake_task'

SCSSLint::RakeTask.new

When you execute rake scss_lint, the above configuration is equivalent to just running scss-lint, which will lint all .scss files in the current working directory and its descendants.

You can customize the task by writing:

require 'scss_lint/rake_task'

SCSSLint::RakeTask.new do |t|
  t.config = 'custom/config.yml'
  t.files = ['app/assets', 'custom/*.scss']
end

You can also use this custom configuration with a set of files specified via the command line:

# Single quotes prevent shell glob expansion
rake 'scss_lint[app/assets, custom/*.scss]'

Files specified in this manner take precedence over the files attribute initialized in the configuration above.

Maven Integration

Maven integration is available as part of the Sass maven plugin scss-lint since version 2.3 Check out the plugin documentation.

The Maven plugin comes with the necessary libraries included, a separate installation of ruby or scss-lint is not required.

Documentation

Code documentation is generated with YARD and hosted by RubyDoc.info.

Contributing

We love getting feedback with or without pull requests. If you do add a new feature, please add tests so that we can avoid breaking it in the future.

Speaking of tests, we use rspec, which can be run like so:

bundle exec rspec

After you get the unit tests passing, you probably want to see your version of scss-lint in action. You can use Bundler to execute your binary locally from within your project's directory:

bundle exec bin/scss-lint

Changelog

If you're interested in seeing the changes and bug fixes between each version of scss-lint, read the SCSS-Lint Changelog.

License

This project is released under the MIT license.