ESLint 0.8.0 released

Highlights

This is a summary of the major changes you need to know about for this version of ESLint.

Plugins

This is the first version of ESLint that formally supports shareable plugins. Currently, plugins allow you to bundle several rules together and publish them on npm. This allows you to share groups of rules easily with others. Creating plugins is very simple:

1. Create an npm package with the name eslint-plugin-{your plugin name} such as eslint-plugin-foo.
2. Export an object that has a rules property. The rules property should contain keys that are your rule IDs and values that are the rule implementation.

For more information, see the plugins documentation.

Ignore files

Due to some feedback we received regarding .eslintignore files, we have decided to automatically duplicate and append /** to every entry in the file. This is to address the issue where simple directory names would not match files within that directory. For example, using node_modules/ would not ignore all files in node_modules/, so now we will use that rule plus node_modules/** to ensure all files in the directory are ignored.

Performance improvements

There were several fixes made to improve performance. On our benchmark, we’ve sped up processing time by 100-200ms (roughly a 10% improvement).

no-global-strict is now global-strict

In an effort to embrace different coding preferences, we’ve changed the no-global-strict rule (which disallowed "use strict" in the global scope) to [global-strict](https://eslint.org/docs/rules/global-strict). This allows you to either enforce or disallow global "use strict".

CLIEngine exported, cli deprecated

ESLint now exports the CLIEngine interface, which is what powers the ESLint command line utility. If you are writing plugins for other systems that make use of the ESLint cli object, then you should transition to using CLIEngine instead.

The cli object will stop being exported in a future version of ESLint.

Breaking Changes

• Breaking: Change no-global-strict to global-strict and add “always” option (fixes #989) (Brandon Mills)
• Breaking: Ignore children of all patterns by adding “/**” (Fixes #1069) (jrajav)

Features

• New: Adding ‘vars-on-top’ rule (fixes #1148) (Gyandeep Singh)
• New: accept plugins from cli (fixes #1113) (Mathias Schreck)
• New: Add no-extra-bind rule to flag unnecessary bind calls (fixes #982) (Bence Dányi)
• New: add no-void rule (fixes #1017). (Mike Sidorov)
• New: Add rules.import() (fixes #1114) (Mathias Schreck)
• New: Added rule disallowing reserved words being used as keys (fixes #1144) (Emil Bay)
• New: Adding ‘plugin’ CLI option (fixes #1112) (Greg)
• New: Adds support for the jasmine env (fixes #1176) (James Whitney)
• New: advanced handle-callback-err configuration (fixes #1124) (Mathias Schreck)
• New: Expose CLIEngine (fixes #1083) (Gyandeep Singh)
• New: Load plugins from configs (fixes #1115). (Mathias Schreck)
• New: Make mergeConfigs() merge plugin entries (fixes #1111) (Mathias Schreck)
• New: space-in-parens rule (Closes #627) (jrajav)

Bug Fixes

• Fix: Add Date.UTC to allowed capitalized functions (David Brockman Smoliansky)
• Fix: Correct a typo in the error message in tests (Michał Gołębiowski)
• Fix: crash when loading empty eslintrc file (fixes #1164) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: don’t break node offsets if hasbang present (fixes #1078) (Vitaly Puzrin)
• Fix: dot-notation rule flags non-keyword reserved words (fixes #1102) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: Error when there’s a \r in .eslintrc (#1172) (Gyandeep Singh)
• Fix: for-in support to no-empty-label rule (fixes #1161) (Marc Harter)
• Fix: mergeConfigs ensures the plugins property exists (fixes #1191). (Mathias Schreck)
• Fix: no-extra-strict behavior for named function expressions (fixes #1209) (Mathias Schreck)
• Fix: no-fallthrough: continue affects control flow, too (fixes #1220) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: no-unreachable should check top-level statements (fixes #1138) (Brandon Mills)
• Fix: no-unused-expressions better directive detection (fixes #1195) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: no-unused-expressions directive support (fixes #1185) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: no-unused-var should respect compound assignments (fixes #1166) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: rewrite no-spaced-func rule (refs #1212) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: rewrite no-unused-vars rule (refs #1212) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: skip dot files and ignored dirs on traverse (fixes #1077, related to #814) (Vitaly Puzrin)
• Fix: space-after-keywords checks finally of TryStatement (fixes #1122) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: space-after-keywords checks while of DoWhileStatement (fixes #1120) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: space-after-keywords w/ “never” should allow else-if (fixes #1118) (Michael Ficarra)
• Fix: Speed up getScope() (refs #1212) (Brandon Mills)
• Fix: Speed up no-unreachable (fixes #1135) (Brandon Mills)
• Fix: Speed up tokens API (refs #1212) (Brandon Mills)
• Perf-related revert “Fix: Speed up tokens API (refs #1212)” (Nicholas C. Zakas)
• Fix: Useless bind call in cli-engine (fixes #1181) (Bence Dányi)

Enhancements

• Update: Add ‘allowSingleLine’ option to brace-style (fixes #1089) (John Gozde)
• Update: Added comments support to .eslintignore (fixes #1084) (Vitaly Puzrin)
• Update: Declare ES6 collections (Map, Set, WeakMap, WeakSet) as built-in globals (fixes #1189) (Michał Gołębiowski)
• Update: enabled ‘no-trailing-spaces’ rule by default (fixes #1051) (Vitaly Puzrin)
• Update: ES3 ReservedWords (fixes #1151) Adds ES3 ReservedWords to the list of keywords in the dot-notation rule (fixes #1151) (Emil Bay)
• Update: Update comment parser to read rule slashes (fixes #1116) (Jary)
• Update: Use xml-escape instead of inline helper (Ref #848) (jrajav)

Documentation

• Docs: Add link to new Atom linter (fixes #1125) (Gil Pedersen)
• Docs: Added Gruntjs plugin on integrations page (Gyandeep Singh)
• Docs: Change eol-last examples to

   (Fixes #1068) (jrajav)

• Docs: document plugin usage (fixes #1117) (Mathias Schreck)
• Docs: fix some typos. (Mathias Schreck)
• Docs: Spell checking and one extra closing curly in code example (Juga Paazmaya)
• docs: Update link (Mathias Bynens)
• Docs: Updates amd description (fixes #1175) (James Whitney)

Build-Related

• Build: Exclude readme/index from rules Resources generation (Fixes #1072) (jrajav)