Enhancing Code Quality with Linters and Formatters

Up to this chapter, we’ve dealt mostly with constructs and code that has been in the hot path – that is, directly necessary to actually do something. However, in most projects, there are many parts that are not directly useful or visible. Quite often, these parts play a crucial role in keeping projects at a certain quality.

One example in the field of software project quality enhancers is the tooling that is used to ensure certain coding standards are being followed. Those tools can appear in many categories – the most prominent categories being linters and formatters. In general, these tools can be categorized as auxiliary tooling.

In this chapter, we’ll learn what types of auxiliary tooling exist and why we’d potentially want to use some extra tooling to enhance our project’s code quality. We’ll introduce the most important auxiliary tools such as ESLint, Stylelint, and Prettier...