[solved] Vale (prose linter) setup

I found that SPELL_VALE works well locally on projects where I'm already using it. Cool. However, I found that just dropping a .vale.ini file into a project tends to fail if the following conditions are true:

there is no directory present as specified in the StylesPath directive of the .vale.ini file
there is a styles directory, but it doesn't have the styles mentioned in the .vale.ini

For example:

E201 Invalid value [/path/to/repo/.vale.ini:9:45]:

   8  ##
   9* ## See: https://vale.sh/docs/topics/config/#stylespath
  10  StylesPath = styles
  11  

The path '/path/to/repo/styles' does not exist.

or:

E100 [loadStyles] Runtime error
style 'alex' does not exist on StylesPath

(examples included so they show up in searches)

So, to fix that, one could create a styles directory in one's repo, then install Vale locally and run vale sync to acquire the styles, then commit all of that to the repo. That seems like an anti-pattern to me.

Therefore, I added the following to my .mega-linter.yml file:

# make sure Vale is setup to run with the styles it needs
SPELL_VALE_PRE_COMMANDS:
  - command: mkdir -p "$(git rev-parse --show-toplevel)/$(sed -Ene 's/^[[:space:]]*StylesPath[[:space:]]*=[[:space:]]*([^#]*)/\1/Ip' < .vale.ini)"
    cwd: "workspace"
  - command: vale sync
    cwd: "workspace"

This will:

parse out the StylesPath line from the .vale.ini file, then run mkdir -p on it (the -p flag has the side effect of having mkdir not throw an error if the directory already exists)
run vale sync which downloads the styles articulated in the .value.ini file

I believe that this is a better approach than having the Vale container synchronize the styles content itself as it allows the user to opt-in by including the steps needed to "make it go" while not requiring the addition of an additional MegaLinter configuration option to allow the user to opt-out.

oxsecurity / megalinter

[solved] Vale (prose linter) setup #3087