mh-ssg VS prettier

This week, I've published my 1st package on npm - mh-ssg - a static site generator CLI.

I also worked on another project, mh-ssg, and added tests to this project as well. I created unit tests for a function called processFolder(). This function accepts an input folder path, output folder path and stylesheet URL. I created two unit tests, one which tests when a valid input folder containing files is passed to the function and one which tests when a non-existent folder is passed to the function. The function logs a message to the console depending on how many files are saved in the output folder, so the tests I wrote tested for these console logs.

For this lab, I picked Jest as the testing tool for mh-ssg. This is a popular Javascript testing framework thanks to its simplicity and ease of usage.

To maintain the quality of source code, I added a formatter and a linter for my project.

Throughout the previous week, I was exploring Docusaurus and found that they have a feature to support static files. I find this feature very useful for any static site generator since images, favicons, stylesheets, etc. are very common parts of a webpage. Therefore, I decided to add this feature in my tool.

As new features are added to the tool, I realized that the logic is not clear anymore and some parts were duplicated, making it inefficient and hard to maintain. This time, I decided to focus on removing those duplications by moving the statements to the appropriate place and extracting function for reusability. All the refactoring was done through a single commit with the help of git rebase.

Luke also implemented the same feature for my project. His code in general was good but I suggested some changes including separating modules and combining functions to remove code duplicates.

After looking through my classmates' projects, I decided to work on Minh Hang's static site generator and filed an issue to her repo.

In the last update, my friend - Dustin - helped to add Markdown as a valid input for my tool. Markdown syntaxes are different from HTML syntaxes and he has worked on converting some of them. This time I decided to add two more:

I've been sending a lot of pull requests but this was actually my first time receiving one 😄 and Dustin was my first contributor. He also proposed to add Markdown support for my tool and to parse all the headings, bold, italics and link from markdown into the corresponding HTML tags. I scanned through the pull request and found some minor issues, including missing new feature in documentation and missing the handling of the output file name. We also had different opinions about the implementation of .txt file and .md file. However after discussion, we came to agreement and I approved his changes.

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.