How does it work?
Last updated
Last updated
Trunk Code Quality still runs your favorite open-source linting, formatting, and static analysis tools and uses the same config files.
Trunk gives superpowers to these tools by installing, managing, running, and re-throwing consistent output from them with the Trunk CLI. The Trunk CLI written in C++ is free, fully configurable, extensible, lightweight, and fast. It runs the tools according to Trunk's config files and can run these tools only on the lines or files change, which makes it practical for large code bases.
Hold The Line (HTL) is the principle that Trunk Code Quality will only run on new changes in your codebase rather than every file in the whole repo. This allows you to use Check to improve your codebase incrementally rather than having to address all of the issues at once. HTL also runs checks much faster than scanning the entire codebase would.
Hold The Line works at the line level of your source code. For example, if a single line has multiple pre-existing issues and a new linter is added, which reports the new issue, then Trunk Code Quality will report just the new issue and not the previous ones.
By default, Trunk runs in hold-the-line mode:
You can still run on all files.
Hold the Line is built into Trunk Code Quality itself. This means existing linters that do not support line-by-line functionality will still work with Hold the Line. Even you write yourself.
The Trunk CLI, specifically trunk check, runs a daemon that monitors relevant file changes and triggers jobs to precompute in the background while you work. The daemon is used both to support real-time background checking in supported extensions such as and , and to precompute check results for faster commits/pushes.
Some native linters are more compute/memory intensive and check allows you to disable background linting for those tools. By default, linters run whenever a file is modified in the background. You can override this behavior by editing the configuration for a tool.
Trunk hermetically installs the static analysis tools you run and their required runtimes. This means these tools are installed and managed by the Trunk CLI, and are unaffected by your systems environment.
If a tool requires python 3.10 but the projects you're working on require python 3.7, Trunk will manage that tool and its python 3.10 runtime automatically and not affect the python 3.7 environment. This means Trunk will not modify or pollute your machine.
Trunk manages the hermetic installation of all required runtimes. You can also specifically pin a version of a runtime you'd like Trunk to use, or tell Trunk to re-use an already-installed runtime on the system.
This can be overridden by defining your own plugin repo to import, overriding individual linter definitions locally, and even writing your own custom linters.
Trunk is fully extensible and configurable through the . When installing a plugin through Trunk, the definition of a plugin's behavior, including install, run, and report instructions, is defined in the Plugins Repo.
Trunk works in CI. Trunk Code Quality provides and can run in any other CI environment. This lets you check Code Quality in every PR with consistent config and consistent results.