Styler

Styler is an Elixir formatter plugin that's combination of mix format and mix credo, except instead of telling you what's wrong, it just rewrites the code for you to fit its style rules.

You can learn more about the history, purpose and implementation of Styler from our talk: Styler: Elixir Style-Guide Enforcer @ GigCity Elixir 2023

---

Styler's documentation is under work as part of releasing 1.0.

You can find the much more complete and usable 0.11.9 documentation and readme here.

Installation

Add :styler as a dependency to your project's mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:styler, "~> 1.0.0-rc.0", only: [:dev, :test], runtime: false},
  ]
end

Please excuse the mess below as I find spare time to update our documentation =) Anything with TODOs are, well, notes to myself on documentation that needs rewriting. Happy to accept PRs if one seems doable to others.

@TODO put this somewhere more reasonable

Note Styler's only public API is its usage as a formatter plugin. While you're welcome to play with its internals, they can and will change without that change being reflected in Styler's semantic version.

Then add Styler as a plugin to your .formatter.exs file

[
  plugins: [Styler]
  # optionally: include styler configuration
  # , styler: [alias_lifting_excludes: []]
]

And that's it! Now when you run mix format you'll also get the benefits of Styler's Stylish Stylings.

Configuration

There isn't much! This is intentional.

Styler is @adobe's internal Style Guide Enforcer - allowing exceptions to the styles goes against that ethos. Happily, it's open source and thus yours to do with as you will =)

However, it's possible to gradually implement Styler via minimal config in .formatter.exs file:

[
  plugins: [Styler],
  styler: [
    # List of rules to enable, if not present all rules are enabled
    # If empty, no rules are enabled
    enabled_rules: [
      # Can have a keyword list of options
      {Styler.Style.ModuleDirectives, []},

      # Or just a module name
      Styler.Style.Pipes
    ]
  ]
]

By default, if the styler key is not present, all rules are enabled.

Supported options

• ignore_prefixes - a list of file prefixes to skip when applying the rule. Example: ignore_prefixes: ["test/"]

Features (or as we call them, "Styles")

@TODO link examples

https://hexdocs.pm/styler/1.0.0-rc.0/styles.html

Styler & Credo

@TODO link credo doc

Your first Styling

Speed: Expect the first run to take some time as Styler rewrites violations of styles.

Once styled the first time, future styling formats shouldn't take noticeably more time.

Styler can break your code

@TODO link troubleshooting mention our rewrite of case true false to if and how we're OK with this being Styler, not SemanticallyEquivalentRewriter.

Thanks & Inspiration

Sourceror

Styler's first incarnation was as one-off scripts to rewrite an internal codebase to allow Credo rules to be turned on.

These rewrites were entirely powered by the terrific Sourceror library.

While Styler no longer relies on Sourceror, we're grateful for its author's help with those scripts, the inspiration Sourceror provided in showing us what was possible, and the changes to the Elixir AST APIs that it drove.

Styler's AST-Zipper implementation in this project was forked from Sourceror. Zipper has been a crucial part of our ability to ergonomically zip around (heh) Elixir AST.

Credo

We never would've bothered trying to rewrite our codebase if we didn't have Credo rules we wanted to apply.

Credo's tests and implementations were referenced for implementing Styles that took the work the rest of the way.

Thanks to Credo & the Elixir community at large for coalescing around many of these Elixir style credos.