Over the past couple of weeks, I've been working on cli-ssg, which is a command line tool to generate a website using .txt/.md files. A lot of changes had accumulated, and this was the perfect time to create an official release 1.0.0.

Last week, I added some tests to cli-ssg using jest, but right now the only way to run them is to run them manually. While this works, having an automated process in place to run the tests would be much better, as that would mean that any change that breaks the tests, cannot be merged.

Static analysis tools help us maintain the quality of our source code by fixing formatting issues, spotting suspicious coding constructs, or alerting us to common errors. As cli-ssg is a collaborative open source project, it becomes especially important to have these in place to enforce common formatting and linting.

Since I had created a basic static site generator (cli-ssg), I wanted to explore other bigger projects that were working on the same problem. One such popular SSG is Docusaurus which is a React based static site generator backed by Facebook.

That being said, index.js was looking a bit messy after the pull request for the --config option was merged into main (#18).

Someone also created a similar issue on my project cli-ssg earlier this week to add support for a config JSON file and so I assigned it to them. There hasn't been a pull request as of me writing this blog, but I look forward to reviewing it! https://github.com/dhillonks/cli-ssg/issues/17

This week I worked on adding more functionality to cli-ssg. I decided to add support for a --lang flag to specify language and add the ability to produce horizontal rule: Add support for horizontal rule in markdown Add a -l flag to generate the lang attribute

Once I had approval from the owner, the .md ticket was assigned to me and I started off by forking the repository and creating a branch to work on the issue (dhillonks/commandline-ssg:issue-8). The code in the repo was already organized into modules which made it easier for me to expand the parsing functionality. I ended up splitting the parsing method to add a flow for .md files. This ensured that I wasn't affecting any old functionality, leaving the parsing for .txt as is. After some coding, I was able to parse .md files and detect headings h1-h6. I used the first h1 text as the placeholder for . The tool could now also generate paragraphs properly for separated lines which were not headings. Moreover, both **bold** and __bold__ markdown syntax for bold text were supported. Along with these code changes, I also modified the Readme.md file to document this new functionality.

Creating a pull request to get the work accepted into the original repo

After I had thoroughly testing my changes, making sure that the new functionality worked and also ensuring that it didn't break any old functionality, I created a pull request on the original repository.

Link to the pr to commandline-ssg - Click here!

I included a description of the changes that were made, the functionality that was added and sample usage for .md files. I also pinged the code owner to review the pull request once it was created. Today, I just found out that my changes were approved and the pull request was merged!

Reviewing a pull request to cli-ssg

I also received a pull request to the open source tool I had created earlier.

Link to the pr to my repo - Click here

The pr was also adding functionality to parse .md files including the headings, bold, italics, links and strikethrough. It looked good at a first glance and the functionality mostly worked but I ended up finding a few issues after looking closely.
The biggest problem was that

paragraphs were not being generated for non-headings. This was obviously an big problem which I need to highlight.
Also, it rendered bold using and italics using which is not the best way to markup emphasis. So I suggested that bold should instead use and italics should instead use .
My last suggestion was not a bug, but since the PR was also implementing the syntax support for links, I wanted to make sure that it also supported automatic links i.e. links within angled braces should be rendered to an anchor tag.
I highlighted these and requested changes when I added my review to the pr. I look forward to reviewing the pr again once these changes are made.

Unused variables

Issue #1 There are some defined variables that never used in the code. const yargs = require("yargs"); const path = require("path"); These two variables are never used in the code, so I suggested my partner to remove them.

In this post, I also use ESLint + Standard JS as my code formatting tools. Formatting JS/TS code by using ESLint is also subjective and opinionated, arguably most people would rather use Prettier instead, which provides more configurable options.

Let's be honest - setting up tools for a new project can be a frustrating process. Especially when you want to jump straight to coding part. This is often the case with ESLint and Prettier, two popular tools in the JavaScript ecosystem that can sometimes interfere with each other when it comes to code formatting. Fortunately, there's a simple solution to this process, and it's called eslint-plugin-prettier.

From my point of view, Prettier doesn't work well for styling with utility classes. For a discussion see Prettier#7863 or Prettier#5948.

Prettier: An opinionated code formatter that enforces a consistent code style.

Automating code checks with static code analysis allows us to enforce code styling effectively. By integrating tools into our workflow, we can identify errors at an early stage, while coding instead of blocking us at the end. For instance, flake8 checks Python code for style and errors, eslint performs similar checks for JavaScript, and prettier automatically formats code to maintain consistency.

So anyways, I wanted to hook up Emacs with Astro support. For now, I've just been roughing it out there and running Prettier by itself and turning off save on format and auto-complete. It's been scary.

If you're a developer, you're surely familiar with Prettier and ESLint. With over 8 years of existence, they have established themselves as references in the JavaScript ecosystem.

prettier is used to format you text

No formatting inconsistencies: The committed code should follow the organization's code formatting standards(prettier or pretty-quick).

Let’s walk through the steps for a one-time setup to configure husky pre-commit and pre-push hooks, ESLint with code styles conventions, prettier code formatter, and lint-staged. Husky automatically runs a script on each commit or push. This is useful for linting files to enforce code styles that keeps the entire code base following conventions.