Deal with Existing Issues

After initializing Trunk, you can begin scanning for issues in your repo, and decide whether to fix them up front, fix them incrementally as you code, or ignore irrelevant suggestions. This page walks through the process of fixing existing issues.

If you only want to prevent new issues from new code changes, skip to Prevent New Issues.

Check for Existing Issues

After initializing Trunk Code Quality, you can run linters and formatters to look for existing issues. You can run Trunk on all files in your repo with this command. This will output all issues detected by every linter enabled in your project.

trunk check --all

Trunk is Git aware

When you run trunk check without specifying --all, it will only run on files you've modified according to git. Remember to specify a base branch if you're using something other than main or master.

Fixing Existing Issues

There are different approaches to dealing with existing issues, such as running format and applying automatic fixes, ignoring irrelevant issues, and sampling linters/files. This section walks you through the process to make fixing issues easier.

Hold-the-line

You don't need to fix all issues upfront. Trunk lets you fix linter errors incrementally with hold-the-line.

Lean more about #hold-the-line-1

Running Formatters and Applying Fixes

Some issues can be fixed automatically. You can apply fixes by running the following command.

trunk check --all --fix

Overwhelmed by Existing Issues?

You can also focus on the issues revealed by 1 linter at a time.

trunk check --all --filter=<linter>

If that still produces too many issues, you can sample your files, such as 1/5 files.

trunk check --all --filter=<linter> --sample=5

You can drill down further and run only one single file.

trunk check --all --filter=<linter> --sample=5 <dir/filename>

If you're still overwhelmed by the results, you can fix them incrementally as you change files. See the hold-the-line section.

Disabling Linters

Some recommended linters could be unnecessary for your project. You can disable and enable linters with these commands:

trunk check enable <linter>
trunk check disable <linter>

Ignore Issues

If there are warnings that don't apply to your project, you can ignore them by line, by file, or by entire class of warnings in each linter's config files.

You can tell Trunk Code Quality to ignore a line in your source code with a special comment like this:

struct FooBar {
  // trunk-ignore(clang-tidy)
  void *ptr = NULL;
};

The comment should contain the name of the linter you want to ignore the following line, in this case clang-tidy For more complex ignore commands, see Ignoring Issues.

Sometimes you may want to ignore entire files or groups of files, such as generated code. To ignore them, use the ignore key to your .trunk/trunk.yaml file:

lint:
  ignore:
    - linters: [ALL]
      paths:
        # Ignore generated files
        - src/generated/**

You can also ignore an entire class of warnings using the config file of your linter, either at the project root or in .trunk/configs

For example, these are the ignores for Markdownlint in .trunk/configs/.markdownlint.yaml:

# Prettier friendly markdownlint config (all formatting rules disabled)
extends: markdownlint/style/prettier
MD024: false
MD033: false
MD034: false

Hold-the-line

You don't need to fix all the issues. Trunk Code Quality has the ability to Hold The Line, which means it only lints your git diffs; only what you changed on your branch gets linted. The pre-existing issues can be managed later.

This allows you to clean up as you go, preventing new issues and letting your team leave each file with better code quality than before.

When you've fixed the existing issues you want to fix, you can skip to Prevent New Issues directly.