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Static analysis Lint-type tool to improve your OO Ruby code

pelusa - /pe 'lu sa/ Build Status Dependency Status

A Ruby Lint to improve your OO skills

Pelusa is a static analysis tool and framework to inspect your code style and notify you about possible red flags or missing best practices.

Above all pelusa doesn't run your code -- it just analyzes it syntactically to gain superficial insights about it, and raise red flags when needed.

Pelusa needs Rubinius to run, due to how easy it is to work with a Ruby AST with it, but it doesn't mean that your Ruby code must run on Rubinius. Since it's a static analysis tool, pelusa doesn't care what your code runs on, it just looks at it and tells you stuff.

Here's a sample of pelusa linting on its own code base:

Why Pelusa?

Pelusa happens to be Spanish for the word "Lint". Yeah, I couldn't believe it either.

Installation and usage

rvm use rbx
gem install pelusa

To run pelusa, you must run Rubinius in 1.9 mode. To do this, export this environment variable:

export RBXOPT=-X19

Then go to a directory where you have some Ruby code, and type this:

pelusa path/to/some_file.rb

Or just run all the Ruby files (**/*.rb) without arguments:



You can use per-project configurations as per which lints to use and their configurations. Just put a .pelusa.yml file the root directory of your project, like this:

sources: lib/**/*.rb
    limit: 5
    limit: 80
      - SomeClass
    enabled: false

This allows you to disable lints, configure their variables, and exclude some classes from being analyzed by certain lints.

About the default set of Lints

This project was born as an inspiration from one of our Monday Talks about Object Oriented Nirvana by @oriolgual. After reading this blog post he prepared his talk and I (@txustice) found it interesting, so I explored the possibility of programmatically linting these practices on a Ruby project. This doesn't mean that any of us thinks these are the true and only practices of Object Orientation, it's just a set of constraints that are fun to follow to achieve a mindset shift in the long run.

Anyway, you are always free to implement your own lints, or the ones that suit your team the best.

Pelusa as a static analysis framework

With Pelusa, writing your own lints becomes very easy. Check out some of the default lints under the lib/pelusa/lint/ directory.

At some point it will be user-extendable by default, but for now you are better off forking the project and adding your own lints as you need them in your team (or removing some default ones you don't like).

Special mentions

The beautiful UTF-8 flowers before each lint ran are taken from Testosterone, a project by @masylum. They're really beautiful, thanks!!!


You can easily contribute to Pelusa. Its codebase is simple and extensively documented.

  • Fork the project.
  • Make your feature addition or bug fix.
  • Add specs for it. This is important so we don't break it in a future version unintentionally.


MIT License. Copyright 2011 Codegram Technologies

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