globbing and multiple file types

Imagine you want to lint your files. Prettier is a great option for some default options. It sets some opinionated defaults so you and Joe don’t need to go to the mat over whether semi-colons are necessary or if it’s safe to rely Javascript’s Automatic Semicolon Insertion. No one needs to die on a hill for tabs or spaces either.

You pick one and move on.

But then, you want to lint multiple file extension and not run the CLI for each of them.

What to do? Enter globbing. The gulp.js team explains:

A glob is a string of literal and/or wildcard characters used to match filepaths. Globbing is the act of locating files on a filesystem using one or more globs.

Globbing’s great for going from having a huge list of scripts tied together, like so:

{
  "scripts": {
    "lint:js": "prettier --check \"src/**/*.js\"",
    "lint:jsx": "prettier --check \"src/**/*.jsx\"",
    "lint:css": "prettier --check \"src/**/*.css\"",
    "lint:ts": "prettier --check \"src/**/*.ts\"",
    "lint": "yarn lint:js && yarn lint:jsx && ..."
  }
}

You can get it down to one line:

{
  "scripts": {
    "lint": "prettier --check \"src/**/*{.jsx?, .css, .ts}\""
  }
}

or

{
    "scripts": {
        "lint": "prettier --check \"src/**/*+(.jsx?|.css|.ts)\""
    },
}

Both approaches work because at this point, it’s just a regular expression.

There are two pieces of globbing happening here:

1. The /**/* part says starting in src, look at every directory (and directory of directories), all the way down look at all files
2. The second part is that I’ve specified certain file extensions: That’s the part between the braces and it means that I’m only concerned with files that are .js, .jsx (the ? after the x means that it’s optional), .css or .ts .

A quick side note about Prettier: If you glob for file types that don’t exist (i.e. you’re looking for a .yml file in a directory that has no .yml files), it will error. Better to add new file types to Prettier as they come up.

Wrapping Up

Don’t fight with Joe. Pick a tool and start producing value sooner.

Once you’ve picked the tool: understanding how globbing can help with their management is a great way to spend a few minutes.