Adding formatter and linter to rost_gen

This week, I added a formatter and linter to rost_gen (a static site generator) to improve the readability of the code and fix common issues automatically. I chose to use rustfmt for the formatter and rust-clippy for the linter.

Setting these up was quite easy as they were already installed when I installed rust using rustup. I took some time to look through the configuration options for rustfmt and found that some of the options (the non-stable ones) were only available in the nightly toolchain. So, I had to install the nightly toolchain:

rustup toolchain install nightly

This automatically installed rustfmt and clippy on the nightly toolchain as well.

Then I added a rustfmt.toml configuration file for rustfmt, and added my desired options in it. I did not change any configuration options for clippy.

I ran rustfmt and discovered quite a lot of spacing changes as expected since I had changed the number of tab spaces from 4 to 2. Though I got a lot of unexpected warnings when I ran clippy. There were over a dozen warnings, most of them being unnecessary returns. I did not know that return was not needed in rust if it is the last statement that will be run in a function. The rest were about several minor things such as using .unwrap_or_else(|_| panic~()) instead of .expect(&format!()).

Next, I wanted to add a configuration file to Visual Studio Code so rustfmt and clippy would run automatically when a file is saved. I installed the rust-analyzer extension and added a settings.json file under the .vscode directory in my project. Here, I added the following:

{
  "rust-analyzer.checkOnSave.command": "clippy",
  "rust-analyzer.rustfmt.extraArgs": [
    "+nightly"
  ],
  "editor.formatOnSave": true,
  "[rust]": {
    "editor.defaultFormatter": "rust-lang.rust-analyzer"
  },
}

I was able to autocomplete most of these with the help of this post. However, I needed to look up to find a way to run the nightly version of rustfmt as most of my configurations needed the nightly toolchain. I found that it could be done by adding the extraArgs property (line 2 above).

I also added an extensions.json file and added rust-analyzer to the recommendations so vscode would prompt if it was not installed.