How to run linters in GitHub Actions for pull requests

Integrating linters into our GitHub Actions workflow for pull requests is a simple yet powerful way to improve code quality and streamline our development process. By automating linting, we can ensure that our code meets the standards, reduce the risk of errors, and create more maintainable code.

To run the GitHub Action in our pull request, we need the dispatcher on: pull_request and the types of interactions that will trigger this routine.

on:
  pull_request:
    types:
      - opened
      - reopened
      - synchronize

In this case, the Action will run when the pull request is opened, reopened, or synchronize.

After that, we can create the job to run the linter:

jobs:
  linting:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Use Node.js 22.x
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 22.x
      - name: install dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: npm lint
        run: npm run lint

Don’t forget to use the command to run the linter you have in your package.json.

For example, if we’re using in your package.json a structure like this:

  "scripts": {
    "lint:check": "eslint .",
  },

With the command lint:check. We need to put it in our GitHub Action.

jobs:
  linting:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Use Node.js 22.x
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 22.x
      - name: install dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: npm lint
        run: npm run lint:check

The full script will be this:

name: Running Linter in Pull Requests

on:
  pull_request:
    types:
      - opened
      - reopened
      - synchronize

jobs:
  linting:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - name: Use Node.js 22.x
        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: 22.x
      - name: install dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: npm lint
        run: npm run lint

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