HCL Vet (hclvet)

HCL vet is a simplistic, pluggable HCL linter.

Features

• Pluggable and configurable rules.
• Write simple, testable rules in golang, using simple data structures.
• Simple, intuitive command line interface.

Install

Download the binary:

• Linux: wget https://github.com/clintjedwards/hclvet/releases/latest/download/hclvet

Go Install:

1. git clone https://github.com/clintjedwards/hclvet && cd hclvet
2. go install

Build manually:

1. git clone https://github.com/clintjedwards/hclvet && cd hclvet
2. go build -o <your_path_here>

How it works

HCLvet allows you to lint HCL files using pluggable rules written in golang. It's meant to offer a simple, configurable interface that makes it easy to write and retrieve rules for.

1) Add a ruleset

Rules are packages into "rulesets" which can be added via the command line.

$ hclvet ruleset add github.com/clintjedwards/hclvet-ruleset-example

Rulesets usually package one or more linting rules and can be added from a variety of sources. You create a local ruleset on your specific machine or download one from a remote source.

The example ruleset above contains a few rules that are used for testing.

2) Start linting files!

$ hclvet lint

By default hclvet looks into the local directory on run to find hcl files. This is easily changed by adding a path or multiple paths. The path argument allows for file globbing:

$ hclvet lint ./internal/testdata/*

How to create rules

Rules are grouped into packaging called rulesets. These rulesets can be added and removed from your local hclvet linter as you see fit.

Find how to create a new ruleset here.

You can find an example ruleset here.

Application structure

• internal: All packages inside here are not meant to be consumed as a library.
  • cli: Main logic of the program; contains all logic that controls command line manipulation.
  • config: Controls application level environment variables.
  • plugin: Provides the go-plugin related structures that allow rules to act as plugins.
  • testdata: Contains artifacts used for testing.
  • utils: Common directory for piece of code used throughout.
• sdk: The software development toolkit that assists with creating rulesets and rules.

Drawbacks

• The lint rules are designed to only consume one file at a time, they cannot alert on project wide errors.

Author

• Clint Edwards - Github