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Code Hygiene

Code hygiene is the practice of writing code that is readable and maintainable. In this chapter, we'll let tools automatically clean up our code for us.

Type checks with LuaCATS annotations​

Lua is incredibly responsive when used for configuration or scripting, giving immediate feedback. But in the context of a project that needs to be maintained long-term, its dynamic typing casts shadows of unpredictability, making Lua projects susceptible to unexpected bugs at the wrong time.

To help mitigate this, Lux provides a lx check command, which uses emmylua_check to statically type-check your codebase based on LuaCATS annotations.

The command will:

  1. Build your project and its dependencies if not done already.
  2. Generate workspace library entries for a .luarc.json file.
  3. Run the static checker.

Linting with lx lint​

Linting is the process of analyzing code for potential errors and stylistic issues (lines too long, unused variables, etc.). To lint the entire project, we can run:

lx lint

Formatting with lx fmt​

Lux comes with a Lua code formatter that can automatically format your Lua code to a consistent style. To make our code style consistent accross the codebase, we can run:

lx fmt

Feel free to take a look at the changes lx fmt made to our code!

Now that our code is nice and shiny, we're ready to move onto the final step: publishing our code to luarocks.org!