Adding ESLint with gulp.js

I've noticed that I am a loose coder on my personal projects but want some level of decorum on Mozilla and other open source projects.  The more developers you have contributing to a project, the tighter the ship you must keep.  The easiest way to do that is requiring contributions to meet a certain code convention criteria via a tool like ESLint.  Since I like to use gulp.js for my build process, I thought I'd share a very basic use of ESLint for your project.

You start by adding ESLint to your package.json file or installing via NPM manually:

npm install gulp-eslint

With ESLint available somewhere within the node path, you can set up a lint task within your gulpfile.js:

gulp.task('lint', function() {
  return gulp.src('lib/**').pipe(eslint({
    'rules':{
        'quotes': [1, 'single'],
        'semi': [1, 'always']
    }
  }))
  .pipe(eslint.format())
  // Brick on failure to be super strict
  .pipe(eslint.failOnError());
});

You can get a full list of rules and possible values here.  How strict you want to be depends on your general philosophy within JavaScript.  Many people make lint a part of their test task as well so that travis-ci can reject code that isn't up to snuff.

Now that I've written this post, I'll probably take the time to add ESLint to my personal projects so that I can get in the habit of always coding to a certain standard.  Practice makes perfect!