@rushstack/eslint-patch

Enhance ESLint with better support for large scale monorepos!

This is a runtime patch that enables new/experimental features for ESLint. It operates as a "monkey patch"
that gets loaded with .eslintrc.js and modifies the ESLint engine in memory. This approach works
with your existing ESLint version (no need to install a forked ESLint), and is fully interoperable with
companion tools such as the ESLint extensions for VS Code and WebStorm.

This package provides several independently loadable features:

- eslint-bulk-suppressions: enables you to roll out new lint rules in your monorepo without having to
clutter up source files with thousands of machine-generated // eslint-ignore-next-line directives.
Instead, the "bulk suppressions" for legacy violations are managed in a separate file called
.eslint-bulk-suppressions.json.

- modern-module-resolution: allows an ESLint config package to provide plugin dependencies, avoiding the
problem where hundreds of projects in a monorepo need to copy+paste the same "devDependencies" in
every package.json file.

> NOTE: ESLint 8.21.0 has now introduced a new ESLINT_USE_FLAT_CONFIG mode that may reduce the need
for the modern-module-resolution patch.

- custom-config-package-names: enables rig packages
to provide shareable configs for ESLint, by removing the requirement that eslint-config must appear in
the NPM package name.

Contributions welcome! If you have more ideas for experimental ESLint enhancements that might benefit
large scale monorepos, consider adding them to this patch.

eslint-bulk-suppressions feature

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As your monorepo evolves and grows, there's an ongoing need to expand and improve lint rules. But whenever a
new rule is enabled, there may be hundreds or thousands of "legacy violations" in existing source files.
How to handle that? We could fix the old code, but that's often prohibitively expensive and may even cause
regressions. We could disable the rule for those projects or files, but we want new code to follow the rule.
An effective solution is to inject thousands of // eslint-ignore-next-line lines, but these "bulk suppressions"
have an unintended side effect: It normalizes the practice of suppressing lint rules. If people get used to
seeing // eslint-ignore-next-line everywhere, nobody will notice when humans suppress the rules for new code.
That would undermine the mission of establishing better code standards.

The eslint-bulk-suppressions feature introduces a way to store machine-generated suppressions in a separate
file .eslint-bulk-suppressions.json which can even be protected using CODEOWNERS policies, since that file
will generally only change when new lint rules are introduced, or in occasional circumstances when existing files
are being moved or renamed. In this way // eslint-ignore-next-line remains a directive written by humans
and hopefully rarely needed.

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As with modern-module-resolution, our hope is for this feature to eventually be incorporated as an official
feature of ESLint. Starting out as an unofficial patch allows faster iteration and community feedback.

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1. Add @rushstack/eslint-patch as a dependency of your project:

``bash
cd your-project
npm install --save-dev @rushstack/eslint-patch
`

2. Globally install the @rushstack/eslint-bulk
command line interface (CLI) package. For example:

`bash
npm install --global @rushstack/eslint-bulk
`

This installs the eslint-bulk shell command for managing the .eslint-bulk-suppressions.json files.
With it you can generate new suppressions as well as "prune" old suppressions that are no longer needed.

3. Load the patch by adding the following require() statement as the first line of
your .eslintrc.js file. For example:

.eslintrc.js
`js
require("@rushstack/eslint-patch/eslint-bulk-suppressions"); // 👈 add this line

module.exports = {
rules: {
rule1: 'error',
rule2: 'warning'
},
parserOptions: { tsconfigRootDir: __dirname }
};
`

Typical workflow:

1. Checkout your main branch, which is in a clean state where ESLint reports no violations.
2. Update your configuration to enable the latest lint rules; ESLint now reports thousands of legacy violations.
3. Run eslint-bulk suppress --all ./src to update .eslint-bulk-suppressions.json.
4. ESLint now no longer reports violations, so commit the results to Git and merge your pull request.
5. Over time, engineers may improve some of the suppressed code, in which case the associated suppressions are no longer needed.
6. Run eslint-bulk prune periodically to find and remove unnecessary suppressions from .eslint-bulk-suppressions.json, ensuring that new violations will now get caught in those scopes.

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`bash
eslint-bulk suppress --rule NAME1 [--rule NAME2...] PATH1 [PATH2...]
eslint-bulk suppress --all PATH1 [PATH2...]
`

Use this command to automatically generate bulk suppressions for the specified lint rules and file paths.
The path argument is a glob pattern) with the same syntax
as path arguments for the eslint command.

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Use this command to automatically delete all unnecessary suppression entries in all
.eslint-bulk-suppressions.json files under the current working directory.

`bash
eslint-bulk prune
`

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The eslint-bulk command is a thin wrapper whose behavior is actually provided by the patch itself.
In this way, if your monorepo contains projects using different versions of this package, the same globally
installed eslint-bulk command can be used under any project folder, and it will always invoke the correct
version of the engine compatible with that project. Because the patch is loaded by ESLint, the eslint-bulk
command must be invoked in a project folder that contains an .eslintrc.js configuration with correctly
installed package.json dependencies.

Here's an example of the bulk suppressions file content:

.eslint-bulk-suppressions.json
`js
{
"suppressions": [
{
"rule": "no-var",
"file": "./src/your-file.ts",
"scopeId": ".ExampleClass.exampleMethod"
}
]
}
`
The rule field is the ESLint rule name. The file field is the source file path, relative to the eslintrc.js file. The scopeId is a special string built from the names of containing structures. (For implementation details, take a look at the calculateScopeId() function.) The scopeId identifies a region of code where the rule should be suppressed, while being reasonably stable across edits of the source file.

modern-module-resolution feature

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This patch is a workaround for a longstanding ESLint feature request
that would allow a shareable ESLint config to bring along its own plugins, rather than imposing peer dependencies
on every consumer of the config. In a monorepo scenario, this enables your lint setup to be consolidated in a
single NPM package. Doing so greatly reduces the copy+pasting and version management for all the other projects
that use your standard lint rule set, but don't want to be bothered with the details.

> NOTE: ESLint 8.21.0 has now introduced a new ESLINT_USE_FLAT_CONFIG mode that may reduce the need
> for this patch.

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We initially proposed this feature in a pull request for the official ESLint back in 2019, however the
maintainers preferred to implement a more comprehensive overhaul of the ESLint config engine. It ultimately
shipped with the experimental new ESLINT_USE_FLAT_CONFIG mode (still opt-in as of ESLint 8).
While waiting for that, Rush Stack's modern-module-resolution patch provided a reliable interim solution.
We will continue to maintain this patch as long as it is being widely used, but we encourage you to check out
ESLINT_USE_FLAT_CONFIG and see if it meets your needs.

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1. Add @rushstack/eslint-patch as a dependency of your project:

`bash
cd your-project
npm install --save-dev @rushstack/eslint-patch
`

2. Add a require() call to the to top of the .eslintrc.js file for each project that depends
on your shareable ESLint config, for example:

.eslintrc.js
`ts
require("@rushstack/eslint-patch/modern-module-resolution"); // 👈 add this line

// Add your "extends" boilerplate here, for example:
module.exports = {
extends: ['@your-company/eslint-config'],
parserOptions: { tsconfigRootDir: __dirname }
};
`

With this change, the local project no longer needs any ESLint plugins in its package.json file.
Instead, the hypothetical @your-company/eslint-config NPM package would declare the plugins as its
own dependencies.

This patch works by modifying the ESLint engine so that its module resolver will load relative to the folder of
the referencing config file, rather than the project folder. The patch is compatible with ESLint 6, 7, and 8.
It also works with any editor extensions that load ESLint as a library.

For an even leaner setup, @your-company/eslint-config can provide the patches as its own dependency.
See @rushstack/eslint-config for a real world example.

custom-config-package-names feature

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Load the custom-config-package-names patch to remove ESLint's
naming requirement
that eslint-config must be part of the NPM package name for shareable configs.

This is useful because Rush Stack's rig package
specification defines a way for many different tooling configurations and dependencies to be shared
via a single NPM package, for example
@rushstack/heft-web-rig.
Rigs avoid a lot of copy+pasting of dependencies in a large scale monorepo.
Rig packages always include the -rig suffix in their name. It doesn't make sense to enforce
that eslint-config should also appear in the name of a package that includes shareable configs
for many other tools besides ESLint.

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Continuing the example above, to load this patch you would add a second line to your config file:

.eslintrc.js
`ts
require("@rushstack/eslint-patch/modern-module-resolution");
require("@rushstack/eslint-patch/custom-config-package-names"); // 👈 add this line

// Add your "extends" boilerplate here, for example:
module.exports = {
extends: [
'@your-company/build-rig/profile/default/includes/eslint/node' // Notice the package name does not start with "eslint-config-"
],
parserOptions: { tsconfigRootDir: __dirname }
};
`

Links

- CHANGELOG.md - Find
out what's new in the latest version

- @rushstack/eslint-bulk CLI package

@rushstack/eslint-patch` is part of the Rush Stack family of projects.