When working in a team or even as an individual, humans often break rules. But sometimes breaking rules can result in a poor quality code which over time grows out to be messy. You can take advantage of linting and static analysis to check whether the written code adheres to your code styling rules. This can be automated using GitHub Actions.
In this blog, you’ll see how to set up GitHub Actions workflows for static analyzing your code before merging it with your production codebase.
Contents
Prerequisites
Before getting started, make sure to have a Dart project ready. For this tutorial, you can follow along with:
Basic Analysis Options
Static Analysis helps you to find problems in your code before executing it. It’s a great tool that you can integrate into your development environment to prevent bugs and ensure that your code conforms to styling guidelines especially when you are working in a team.
analysis_options.yaml is a YAML file that you can use to specify the lint rules. Create this file at the root of your project and add the following code to it:
include: package:lint/analysis_options.yaml
analyzer:
errors:
avoid_function_literals_in_foreach_calls: ignore
avoid_print: ignore
omit_local_variable_types: ignore
overridden_fields: ignore
prefer_collection_literals: ignore
unnecessary_await_in_return: ignore
unnecessary_this: ignore
use_setters_to_change_properties: ignore
Setting up GitHub Actions
Next, create a GitHub Actions workflow for doing a static analysis of your project’s source code and even run some tests. This workflow will run on each push and pull request made to the master branch.
Create a ci.yml file in the .github/workflows directory and add the following code to it:
name: CI
on:
push:
branches: [master]
pull_request:
branches: [master]
jobs:
lint:
runs-on: ubuntu-latest
steps:
- name: Set up Repository
uses: actions/checkout@v2
- name: Set up Dart
uses: dart-lang/setup-dart@v1
- name: Install Pub Dependencies
run: dart pub get
- name: Verify Formatting
run: dart format --output=none --set-exit-if-changed .
- name: Analyze Project Source
run: dart analyze
- name: Run tests
run: dart test
In the above workflow, you are using a stable version of Dart. However, if you want to set up a different Dart configuration, you can use sdk input with dart-lang/setup-dart action as in the following code:
- name: Set up Dart
uses: dart-lang/setup-dart@v1
with:
sdk: 2.10.3
# or
- name: Set up Dart
uses: dart-lang/setup-dart@v1
with:
sdk: dev
Results
At this stage, you can push directly to the master branch and check out the execution of your GitHub Action.
So, you have been able to set up your lint pipeline in less than two minutes. This power of GitHub Actions can help any team to achieve better developer workflow and faster releases.
