ESLint not working in VS Code?

Question

ESLint is not working for me in VS Code. I have the plugin installed in VS Code, and ESLint itself as a developer dependency in my package.json, which I have installed as well.

I modified the following option in the VS Code User Settings:

{
  "eslint.options": { "configFile": "C:/mypath" }
}

I have use the command eslint --init to add the basic .eslintrc.json to the main directory of my package.

Other people were able to get ESLint feedback from VS Code using the exact same package with the exact same ESLint config file.

I have received no feedback of any kind when directly breaking multiple rules that were all included in the recommended rule set that is by default inside of the .eslintrc.json file.

What am I missing?

Edit: I have tested using ESLint via command line, and everything worked as expected, with the errors found where they should have, however, these same errors never showed up in VS Code. The issue seems to be on VS Code's side and not ESLint.

Solution 1

There are a few reasons that ESLint may not be giving you feedback. ESLint is going to look for your configuration file first in your project and if it can't find a .eslintrc.json there it will look for a global configuration. Personally, I only install ESLint in each project and create a configuration based off of each project.

The second reason why you aren't getting feedback is that to get the feedback you have to define your linting rules in the .eslintrc.json. If there are no rules there, or you have no plugins installed then you have to define them.

Solution 2

If ESLint is running in the terminal but not inside VSCode, it is probably because the extension is unable to detect both the local and the global node_modules folders.

To verify, press Ctrl+Shift+U in VSCode to open the Output panel after opening a JavaScript file with a known eslint issue. If it shows Failed to load the ESLint library for the document {documentName}.js -or- if the Problems tab shows an error or a warning that refers to eslint, then VSCode is having a problem trying to detect the path.

If yes, then set it manually by configuring the eslint.nodePath in the VSCode settings (settings.json). Give it the full path (for example, like "eslint.nodePath": "C:\\Program Files\\nodejs") -- using environment variables is currently not supported.
This option has been documented at the ESLint extension page.

Solution 3

In my case, since I was using TypeScript with React, the fix was simply to tell ESLint to also validate these files. This needs to go in your user settings:

"eslint.validate": [ "javascript", "javascriptreact", "html", "typescriptreact" ],

Solution 4

configuring working directories solved it for me, since I had multiple projects with own .eslintrc files openend in the same window.

Put this in your .vscode/settings.json

"eslint.workingDirectories": [
    "./backend", 
    "./frontend"
],

thanks to this guy on github: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-eslint/issues/696#issuecomment-542592372

PS: useful command to list all subdirectories containing an .eslintrc except /node_modules:

find . .eslintrc | grep .eslintrc | grep -v node_modules

Solution 5

Case 1/2: First-time plugin installation? approval is necessary

Little "weird" user experience (Hard to notice) - anyway - Since V 2.1.10 -
You must change the "currently block" status bar on New/First installation.

ESLint plugin Version 2.1.10 changelog (08/10/2020)

no modal dialog is shown when the ESLint extension tries to load an ESLint library for the first time and an approval is necessary. Instead the ESLint status bar item changes to ESLint status icon indicating that the execution is currently block.

Click on the status-bar (Right-Bottom corner):

Opens this popup:

Approve ==> Allows Everywhere

-or- by commands:

ctrl + Shift + p -- ESLint: Manage Library Execution

Read more here under "Release Notes":

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=dbaeumer.vscode-eslint

---

Case 2/2: The plugin already installed/approve

Open the terminal Ctrl+`

Under output ESLint dropdown, you find useful debugging data (Errors, warnings, info).

For example, missing .eslintrc-.json throw this error:

Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, realpath

Next, check if the plugin enabled:

By deafult there is no need to edit eslint.probe

Last, Since v 2.0.4 - eslint.validate in "normal cases" (react, vue, typescript, js, html, md) not necessary anymore (old legacy setting)**

**Many out-of-date stackoverflow answers (even her) indicate that eslint.probe file should be edited.

eslint.probe = an array for language identifiers for which the ESLint extension should be activated and should try to validate the file. If validation fails for probed languages the extension says silent. Defaults to [javascript, javascriptreact, typescript, typescriptreact, html, vue, markdown].

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Comments

[Admin]

Note that, If you have installed ESLint successfully, but got no feedback from ESLint as you expected, then there's a chance that you might have forgotten to initialize ESLint. To do that, run this command from the root of your project ./node_modules/.bin/eslint --init

[EJ Mason]

If you have a local .eslintrc.json you do not need to define your configFile in your settings.

[John Landon]

I have the local .eslintrc.json already placed in the main folder of my project, and my rules extends the recommended rules by ESLint, which are the ones I was testing. I have also added some rules of my own to further test, but with no success.

[John Landon]

When using ESLint directly via command line, everything works properly, and it finds all errors. The issue here seems to be with VS Code, and not ESLint.

[EJ Mason]

try enabling eslint in your settings "eslint.enable": true. Make sure you don't have any eslint installed globally. and try to remove the configFile path. That is how I have my vscode set up. I run into a lot of problems when I have eslint globally and locally installed.

[John Landon]

I already have it set to true, and I just tried uninstalling it globally, to only have it locally and I have removed the path option with no success.

[EJ Mason]

Open up your output at the bottom of the screen. Change it to eslint up near the top right of the output window. Now what does it say in that window?

[Andrei Voicu]

thank you, spent a few hours figuring out why eslint did now work globally with vscode

[Jared Knipp]

Ugh! I don't know why this didn't occur to me sooner. VSCode would not recognize module aliases defined in my Webpack config file and was displaying Eslint errors but running Eslint from the command line did not. Restarting VScode fixed the problem!

[Roman]

I noticed that sometimes it takes a couple of minutes to activate the changes or even you need to restart vscode before something takes effect. For sure, you need to restart the program each time to see if new setting works or not

[atulkhatri]

For me, the issue was that I had not installed ESLint extension in VSCode.

[Ellis]

Worked for me. (On Windows)

[oyalhi]

For me, in addition to what you've specified, I had to add "javascriptreact" and "typescriptreact" since my project uses React.

[dmudro]

Great point. javascript and javascriptreact are default values but I think you would need to have *scriptreact added back for JSX files.

[ggat]

TypeScript with React here, worked for me too. Thanks

[Peter Boomsma]

TypeScript with React on Windows and this worked for me as well.

[Nick Grealy]

I needed to create an eslintrc.js in the ROOT of my project (*i.e. not subfolders).

[bshek]

I had the same issue. This helped me to resolve it but I didn't need to change the settings.json file. I went into the Problems tab and clicked on the light bulb beside the error and on the pop-up window selected allow.

[the_haystacker]

Adding configuration to .prettierrc solved my issue. The problem was not with the eslintrc.json file.

[Chaos Crafter]

I think this one needs to be pinned - that Allow action was so non-obvious. This fixed it all for me.

[Sakura Kinomoto]

If you have the same problem, doesn't give an answer for telling it. It's better to upvote the question and/or give a comment for put some additional data.

[alfreema]

It's working for us on multiple computers and environments (Windows, Ubuntu WSL 1, Ubuntu WSL 2), and none of those need to be checked. We don't have a "Eslint: Enable" option.

[alfreema]

NOTE: On Windows 10, .vscode/settings.json in the root of our project were not taking effect, but they WERE for our Ubuntu WSL environments. On Windows 10, the default settings.json was under our %appdata% folder, and when we modified it to have the "editor.codeActionsOnSave ...." lines, it started working. The easiest way to get to the right settings.json is to go to the ESLint plugin settings and scroll to the bottom to find a link to it. So again, on Windows 10 only, it was ignoring the settings.json in our .vscode folder in the root of our project.

[Jami]

My problem was that I install eslint per-project (not globally) and I was using Docker, so I forgot to run npm i on my local machine.

[Clonkex]

What do you mean by "user settings"? Is this .eslintrc.json or something else?

[Simone]

This is your settings.json file. You can open this file via the command palette, on macOS it's Cmd + Shift + P to open it, then search for Preferences: Open Settings (JSON)