Command-Line-Options.md

Command Line Options

Introduction

Reek follows standard Unix convention for passing arguments.

Check out

reek -h

for details.

Telling Reek to use a specific configuration file

In case your configuration file is not in the standard location (that would be your project directory or whatever directory you're running Reek from) you can specify a configuration file with the -c option like this:

reek -c /somewhere/on/your/filesystem/reek_config.yml lib/

Telling Reek Which Code to Check

Probably the most standard use case would be to check all Ruby files in the lib directory:

reek lib/*.rb

In general, if any command-line argument is a directory, Reek searches that directory and all sub-directories for Ruby source files. Thus

reek lib

would be equivalent to

reek lib/**/*.rb

Occasionally you may want to quickly check a code snippet without going to the trouble of creating a file to hold it. You can pass the snippet directly to Reek's standard input:

echo "def x() true end" | reek

To just check all Ruby files in the current directory, you can simply run it with no parameters:

reek

Telling Reek Which Smells to Detect

You can tell Reek to only check particular smells by using the --smell option and passing in the smell name.

For example, to only check for Utility Function, you would use:

reek --smell UtilityFunction

You can select several smells by repeating the --smell option like so:

reek --smell UtilityFunction --smell UncommunicativeMethodName

Output options

Output smell's line number

By passing in a "-n" flag to the reek command, the output will suppress the line numbers:

$ reek -n mess.rb

mess.rb -- 2 warnings:
  x doesn't depend on instance state (UtilityFunction)
  x has the name 'x' (UncommunicativeMethodName)

Otherwise line numbers will be shown as default at the beginning of each warning in square brackets:

$ reek mess.rb

mess.rb -- 2 warnings:
  [2]:x doesn't depend on instance state (UtilityFunction)
  [2]:x has the name 'x' (UncommunicativeMethodName)

Enable the verbose mode

reek has a verbose mode which you might find helpful as a beginner. "verbose" just means that behind each warning a helpful link will be displayed which leads directly to the corresponding reek documentation page. This mode can be enabled via the "-U" or "--documentation" flag.

So for instance, if your test file would smell of ClassVariable, this is what the reek output would look like:

reek -U test.rb

test.rb -- 1 warning:
  [2]:Dummy declares the class variable @@class_variable (ClassVariable) [https://github.com/troessner/reek/blob/master/docs/Class-Variable.md]

Note the link at the end.