JavaScript linting in Atom

I’ve started to use Atom extensively for NodeJS development. Having a good linting tool is crucial for me when developing, so I wanted to share my Atom setup. I use Linter with the linter-jshint plugin. You can easily install both packages directly via Atoms settings page.

JSHint is highly flexible and it can be configured to match your needs. I have a setup that I think works well for NodeJS development, but it’s not holy in any way so feel free to change it to match your taste. You should have a .jshintrc file in your projects’ root folder. Here’s what my .jshintrc looks like:

{
  "globals"   : {
    "describe"   : false,
    "it"         : false,
    "before"     : false,
    "beforeEach" : false,
    "after"      : false,
    "afterEach"  : false
  },
  "camelcase": true,
  "curly": true,
  "eqeqeq": true,
  "freeze": true,
  "indent": 2,
  "latedef": true,
  "laxcomma": true,
  "node": true,
  "trailing": true,
  "strict": true,
  "unused": "vars",
  "undef": true
}

There are also a few options for the linter-jshint plugin available directly on the Atom settings page for the package. You can for example determine when JSHint should validate your file and how you want to see the errors.

Happy coding!