How to avoid nasty surprises by linting your styles with stylelint

Keeping your CSS in JS clean

A guide to using stylelint with emotion or styled-components

Photo by Adam Birkett on Unsplash

I love CSS in JS. I use it all the time at work and on personal projects. I love how it makes theming and dynamic styles a breeze. But one thing I missed from regular CSS is linting.

Stylelint is a fantastic project that makes it easy to enforce convention and avoid errors in your styles. However, up until recently I had never used it with CSS in JS. The release of version 9.5.0 added first class support for linting CSS in JS. Now it’s easier than ever to lint your projects styled with popular libraries like styled-components and emotion.

The rest of this article will concentrate on emotion, but the process for linting styled-components is virtually identical.

Let’s lint some CSS!

Let’s start by creating a new React application. For this, we can use create-react-app.

create-react-app my-app

Next, we add some dependencies. We can start by adding emotion.

cd my-app

yarn add @emotion/core @emotion/styled

This installs the two emotion dependencies. We can style components in two different ways with emotion. To make sure our linting works properly, we should start by creating and styling components.

Styling components with the CSS prop

Using the css prop, we can pass in either object styles, or string styles.

import { jsx, css } from " @emotion/core "; const Footer = props => (

<footer

css={{

// object styles!

width: "100%",

}}

>

<p

css={css`

/* string styles */

color: blue;

text-align: centre;

font-size: 1.2re;

`}

>

{props.children}

</p>

</footer>

); export default Footer;

In this code example, we created a footer component. We styled the footer tag with object styles, and the paragraph tag with string styles. For more information, check out the emotion documentation.

Using Styled components

Using styled , we can pass styles to html tags.



import styled from " import React from "react";import styled from " @emotion/styled "; const StyledHeader = styled.header`

width: 100%;

min-height: 100vh;

display: flex;

align-items: center;

justify-content: center;

`; const StyledH1 = styled.h1`

font-size: 2re;

`; const Header = props => (

<StyledHeader>

<StyledH1>{props.children}</StyledH1>

</StyledHeader>

); export default Header;

In this code example, we created a header component, and we styled it with the styled prop. For more information, check out the emotion documentation.

Introducing stylelint

Now that we have styled some components, let’s get linting!

yarn add -D stylelint stylelint-config-standard

Then create a file called .stylelintrc

{

"extends": [

"stylelint-config-standard"

]

}

Then we add a npm script to our package.json

"lint:css": "stylelint './src/*.js'"

We can then run the script, and we get the following output

$ stylelint './src/*.js' src/footer.js

17:20 ✖ Unexpected unknown unit "re" unit-no-unknown

18:6 ✖ Unexpected missing end-of-source no-missing-end-of-source-newline

newline src/header.js

5:3 ✖ Expected empty line before declaration declaration-empty-line-before

13:3 ✖ Expected empty line before declaration declaration-empty-line-before error Command failed with exit code 2.

As you can see, we get a few lint errors. This is due to the fact that stylelint-config-standard is optimized for plain old CSS. Let’s add a few rule overrides to our .stylelintrc file.

{

"extends": [

"stylelint-config-standard"

],

"rules": {

"no-empty-source": null,

"declaration-empty-line-before": null,

"no-missing-end-of-source-newline": null,

}

}

Now we can run yarn lint:css and we get the following output.

$ stylelint './src/*.js' src/footer.js

17:20 ✖ Unexpected unknown unit "re" unit-no-unknown src/header.js

13:14 ✖ Unexpected unknown unit "re" unit-no-unknown

Woops! 😱 Looks like we wrote some bad CSS. Good thing stylelint was there to catch us 😅. As you can see, stylelint caught our mistakes in components styled with both the css prop, and the styled prop. Pretty cool!

Using jest with stylelint

Jest is a great way to run your tests, so why not use it for linting as well?

Start by installing some dependencies.

yarn add -D jest jest-runner-stylelint

Next, create jest.stylelint.config.js

module.exports = {

runner: "jest-runner-stylelint",

displayName: "stylelint",

moduleFileExtensions: ["js"],

testMatch: ["<rootDir>/src/**/*.js"],

};

Then, we update our lint:css command to the following

"lint:css": "jest --config jest.stylelint.config.js

Then we run lint:css again.

$ jest --config jest.stylelint.config.js

FAIL stylelint src/serviceWorker.js src/serviceWorker.js

25:5 ✖ Unknown word CssSyntaxError

Ah, what’s this? Looks like jest-runner-stylelint is using version 8.3.1 of stylelint. That’s before stylelint added support for CSS in JS.

Let’s force jest-runner-stylelint to use the latest version of stylelint . Simply add a resolutions field to your package.json

"resolutions": {

"jest-runner-stylelint/stylelint": "10.0.1"

}

Then run yarn again to reinstall the dependencies, and run yarn lint:css

This time, we get the same output as before

$ jest --config jest.stylelint.config.js

PASS stylelint src/serviceWorker.js

FAIL stylelint src/footer.js src/footer.js

17:20 ✖ Unexpected unknown unit "re" unit-no-unknown PASS stylelint src/App.test.js

PASS stylelint src/App.js

PASS stylelint src/index.js

FAIL stylelint src/header.js src/header.js

13:14 ✖ Unexpected unknown unit "re" unit-no-unknown Test Suites: 2 failed, 4 passed, 6 total

Tests: 2 failed, 4 passed, 6 total

Now all that is left to do is fix up those unknown units, and we are good to go 🚀.

Check out the repository on github.