Table of Contents

Private linters can be added throughGo's plugin system.

For a private linter (which acts as a plugin) to work properly,the plugin as well as the golangci-lint binaryneeds to be built for the same environment.

CGO_ENABLED is another requirement.

This means thatgolangci-lint needs to be built for whatever machine you intend to run it on(cloning the golangci-lint repository and running aCGO_ENABLED=1 make build should do the trick for your machine).

Create a Plugin

Your linter must provide one or moregolang.org/x/tools/go/analysis.Analyzer structs.

Your project should also usego.mod.

All versions of libraries that overlapgolangci-lint (including replaced libraries) MUST be set to the same version asgolangci-lint.You can see the versions by runninggo version -m golangci-lint.

You'll also need to create a Go file likeplugin/example.go.

This file MUST be in the packagemain, and MUST define an exposed function calledNew with the following signature:

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funcNew(conf any)([]*analysis.Analyzer,error){
// ...
}

Seeplugin/example.go for more info.

To build the plugin, from the root project directory, run:

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go build -buildmode=plugin plugin/example.go

This will create a plugin*.so file that can be copied into your project or another well known location for usage ingolangci-lint.

Configure a Plugin

If you already have a linter plugin available, you can follow these steps to define its usage in a projects.golangci.yml file.

An example linter can be found athere.

If you're looking for instructions on how to configure your own custom linter, they can be found further down.

1. If the project you want to lint does not have one already, copy the.golangci.yml to the root directory.

2. Adjust the YAML to appropriatelinters.settings.custom entries as so:

   .golangci.yml
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   version:"2"
   linters:
   settings:
   custom:
   example:
   path: /example.so
   description: The description of the linter
   original-url: github.com/golangci/example-linter
   settings:# Settings are optional.
   one: Foo
   two:
   -name: Bar
   three:
   name: Bar

That is all the configuration that is required to run a custom linter in your project.

Custom linters are enabled by default, but abide by the same rules as other linters.

If the disable all option is specified either on command line or in.golangci.yml fileslinters.default: none, custom linters will be disabled;they can be re-enabled by adding them to thelinters.enable list,or providing the enabled option on the command line,golangci-lint run -Eexample.

The configuration inside thelinters.settings field of linter have some limitations (there are NOT related to the plugin system itself):we use Viper to handle the configuration but Viper put all the keys in lowercase, and. cannot be used inside a key.