Config file in $HOME is not identified

[Roger Oba]

Hi 👋

I'm trying this out and I placed my .markdownlintrc in $HOME/.markdownlintrc (aka ~/.markdownlintrc), but it's not able to pick it up. I read the config placement rules in https://www.npmjs.com/package/rc#standards but that seems to be related to npm projects, which have a name, so I think it doesn't really apply. My $HOME is a parent folder of the current directory, and there are no other .markdownlint* files anywhere in my computer.

Any hints of what could be the issue?

Thanks in advance!

[David Anson]

That should work. How do you know it's not being used? Can you show an example?

[Roger Oba]

So I have a README file that has line length (MD013) issues. If I run

markdownlint -- README.md

Then it points out those MD013 issues.

But if I run:

markdownlint --config $HOME/.markdownlintrc -- README.md

Then it correctly picks up my config where I've set MD013: false, then it doesn't throw linter errors for line length.

My config file is identical to the sample/template one in the documentation, except I replaced the MD013 config with:

# MD013/line-length - Line length
MD013: false

[Roger Oba]

For documentation purposes, the directly where I'm running the command is

$HOME/Documents/Projects/some-folder/

And the .markdownlintrc file is in $HOME

[David Anson]

That all sounds right to me, tho I don't do this myself. I will give it a try later today. What platform, by the way?

[Roger Oba]

Thank you!

macOS 12.4, do you need any other env dump? I installed via brew btw. No node.js project

[David Anson]

The INI format uses =, not :, so your .markdownlintrc should be:

# MD013/line-length - Line length
MD013 = false

If you make that change, it should behave as you expect.

Interestingly, things work when you pass --config because that uses the markdownlint library to parse the configuration file which supports YAML where : is valid.

[Roger Oba]

@DavidAnson The entire file is in yaml though 😅 You can find it here: https://github.com/rogerluan/dotfiles/blob/master/.markdownlintrc

Just as a side note now that I shared my actual file with you ☝️ my dotfiles repo uses a symlink for that .markdownlintrc file, but that doesn't matter because I also tested this by placing the actual file in that location (without a symlink) and the results were the same 😬

And just as an extra data point, I pulled the sample from the yaml sample, not ini: https://github.com/DavidAnson/markdownlint/blob/main/schema/.markdownlint.yaml

Also, I looked for a debugging option like --verbose, --debug, etc, to hopefully print more logs when executing the command, but there's none 😞 is there any env var I can set when executing it, to print logs that would help us debug this issue?

[Roger Oba]

@DavidAnson I may have misunderstood your previous message though, are you saying that when I place my config file in the $HOME dir, this specific setup only accepts an INI format? 😥

[David Anson]

Right, the rc/run-con package supports application-named config files in JSON and INI format. It does not seem to be extensible to add other formats. This is unique to CLI(1).

The --config option supports JSON(C) and YAML using a shared function from markdownlint that is common to the library, CLI(1), CLI2, and the VS Code extension. It is extensible.

I'm not a fan of rc/run-con, but it wasn't my doing and it would be breaking to remove.

If you are happy with YAML, you could put (or symlink) a file called .markdownlint.yaml in the current directory when running the tool and it should be picked up automatically.

[Roger Oba]

Ah, if it's able to pick up json, I'll try that! Just am not super excited about INI 🙈
Thank you!!

[Roger Oba]

It worked!! I cannot name it .json though, I gotta keep the naming .markdownlintrc strictly 😄 but I'm glad we made it work!

I'll add some docs around this just so it doesn't catch anyone else :)