Barbaric Tip of the Week is a weekly series whose main purpose is to share tiny bits of knowledge that I find specially useful and interesting.

eslint is a JavaScript linter, a static analysis tool, that helps you find errors in your JavaScript code before executing it and conform to a predefined set of styles for better uniformity. Since JavaScript is a dynamic language this is very useful as it behaves like a lightweight compiler and warns you of common errors as soon as they’re introduced.

I started using eslint because it was the first JavaScript linter that brought a solid support for ES6. It had a small problem though, it was not completely straightforward to setup and configure. I remember the two first times I used eslint I had to scourge the web to try to understand how to get a sane default configuration for my projects. But fortunately that’s not longer the case!

Now you can get started with eslint by installing it via npm:

$ npm install -g eslint

And just typing:

$ eslint --init

You can get your code analyzed and be offered some suggestions, or select popular style guides (like Google’s) or just answer questions regarding your preferences:

Awesome right? That’s a nice developer experience right here. So now go forth and lint.

I woke up super early today to watch the live stream from the Angular 2 special event at mountain view and… TaDa!

Angular 2 Final is Out!!

Lots of congrats to the team and everyone involved!

If you’d like to know more about the release, take a look at the official announcement and listen to this special episode of Adventures in Angular with info about:

• Angular 2 final version
• Angular 2 moves to semantic versioning
• What to expect from Angular 2
• The Angular 2 ecosystem
• CLI, AOT and lazy loading
• etc, etc

Now there’s no excuse not to get started! :) Take a look at any of these resources and start kicking ass:

• Angular 2 Quickstart
• Tour of Heroes Tutorial
• Angular docs
• Viktor Savkin’s blog on Angular 2
• Thoughtram blog on Angular 2
• John Papa’s Pluralsight course “Angular 2 First Look”
• Deborah Kurata’s Pluralsight course “Angular 2 Getting Started”
• My Angular 2 get started step by step series

UPDATE (5th April 2017): This article has been updated to the latest release of the Angular CLI 1.0.0 and the latest version of Angular 2+ (Angular 4).

I have run a couple of workshops on Angular (2+) and the most number of issues that prevented (or slowed down) participants from enjoying Angular 2 were related to setting up their development environment. I also get questions often in my blog and mailbox about JavaScript and Angular (2+) and there’s a surprising number of them related not to Angular itself but issues with module loading and the dev environment. All of this is because “modern” web development (as it’s often referred to) is not easy.

We have all these awesome new languages and tools that improve our development experience like TypeScript, ES6, SASS, eslint, Karma, etc but they come at a price because the browsers can’t quite understand them or they require additional configuration. So we need that transpilation/automation layer, territory of the so called front-end build pipeline, to do that job for us. And that means that as web developers there’s now an extra skill that we need to learn and master. Indeed if you’ve worked with any sizeable JavaScript project in the past two years chances are that you’ve gone through the non-trivial task of building your own pipeline with grunt, gulp, broccoli or webpack.

Fortunately for us, the Angular (2+) team is on a quest to make the Angular (2+) ecosystem the most awesome possible. That’s why they are working on a tool that will help you create an Angular (2+) app from scratch with all necessary configuration with just three words: ng new my-app.

The Angular CLI. Sounds interesting?

UPDATE 14th Sep 2016: This guide also works for updating your apps to RC6, RC7 and Angular 2 Final.

Earlier this week we got the RC5 release of Angular 2, a version of Angular 2 that “represents the expected public API for our 2.0.0 release, including router and forms APIs” according to Rob Wormald of the Angular 2 team. Yey!

I’ve spent this week updating my getting started series and compiled the most important changes you need to do to update your application from Angular 2 RC4 to RC5 including the new router.