Show HN: Alint, a fast linter for repository structure and hygiene(github.com)
github.com
Show HN: Alint, a fast linter for repository structure and hygiene
https://github.com/asamarts/alint
1 comments
For a typical JS/TS project already using ESLint + Prettier + CI checks, what kinds of issues would alint catch that those wouldn’t?
To check the design against reality, I built (vibed) working configs for 30 real OSS repos. The corpus is deliberately varied: single-language workspaces and polyglot monorepos, from small clean trees up to roughly 150k-file mega-repos, with and without mature in-house tooling. Each one has a writeup of what alint catches that the repo's existing tooling does not, including the false-positive-in-spirit cases; the configs are committed under examples/ so the claims are checkable instead of asserted. Findings span large-scale verify-script consolidation in mega-repos, real Trojan-Source bidi-control characters in archived release notes (caught by the bundled oss-baseline ruleset), and the usual CI hygiene drift.
The benchmark is the project's strongest discipline, every release is thoroughly benchmark-gated - see docs/benchmarks for methodology and results. 0.2s-1.5s for 100k file repos, 5s-15s for 1m file repos.
Test discipline is layered: unit tests, declarative YAML end-to-end scenarios, property-based invariants, smoke fixtures that pin rule semantics so an ignored knob is caught at PR time, and the benchmark gate. The project is dual-licensed Apache-2.0 OR MIT, telemetry-free (the only outbound is an extends: URL you wrote yourself, SRI-pinned), reproducible build, one static binary. Install: cargo install alint, a Homebrew tap, a distroless Docker image, an npm shim, or a GitHub Action.
The roadmap is public under docs/design/. Near-term: broader extensibility (richer plugin surface, more bundled rulesets) and a few high-demand rule kinds the case studies surfaced.
The fit with coding agents has been getting the most interest lately. Agents make exactly the structural mistakes alint catches: a stray .bak file, a scratch PLAN.md at the repo root, a committed console.log, drift off the repo naming convention. A --format agent output emits per-violation instruction strings an agent can act on, and alint export-agents-md writes the active ruleset into an AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md section.
What it deliberately does not do is parse code. If a check needs an AST or type information, that belongs to clippy or eslint and alint stays out of it. On bazel roughly 29% (15 of 52 checks) are out of scope for exactly that reason, and the writeup breaks down which and why.
I am open to all kinds of feedback: pain points, things that should be primitives and are not, install or first-run friction, naming, DSL ergonomics (the JSONPath dashed-key bracket-form papercut has caught everyone), ruleset coverage. If you try it on a repo of yours and it falls over, that is the feedback I most want to hear.
Repo: https://github.com/asamarts/alint
Site and docs: https://alint.org
Benchmarks: https://alint.org/benchmarks/
The 30 example configs: https://alint.org/examples/