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Learn about the Vale command-line interface.
The Vale CLI is a powerful tool for linting your content in a variety of formats. To get started, try running with no arguments:
Environment variables
The following list of environment variables are supported by the vale command-line interface:
| Variable | Description |
|---|---|
VALE_CONFIG_PATH | Override the default search process by specifying a .vale.ini file. |
VALE_STYLES_PATH | Specify the location of the default StylesPath. |
You can inspect the current environment variables by running:
bash$ vale ls-vars
The exact steps for setting environment variables depend on your operating system, but here are some useful links for Windows and macOS.
CLI options
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
sync | Download and install packages. See Packages for more information. $ vale sync |
ls-config | Print the current configuration options as JSON. $ vale ls-config |
ls-metrics | Print the computed metrics for the given file. See metric for more information. $ vale ls-metrics path/to/file |
ls-dirs | Print the location of default configuration directories. $ vale ls-dirs |
ls-vars | Print the supported environment variables. $ vale ls-vars |
--config | Override the default configuration search process. $ vale --config='path/to/.vale.ini' README.md |
--ext | Assign a file extension to stdin. $ echo "*This* is Markdown" | vale --ext='.md' |
--filter | An expression to filter rules by. See Filters for more information. $ vale --filter='"heading" in .Scope' test.md |
--glob | A glob pattern to match files against. See Globbing for more information. $ vale --glob='*.md' some-dir |
--ignore-syntax | Treat all input as plain text. $ vale --ignore-syntax README.md |
--no-exit | Do not return a non-zero exit code if there are errors. $ vale --no-exit README.md |
--no-wrap | Do not wrap output. $ vale --no-wrap README.md |
--no-global | Do not load the global configuration. $ vale --no-global README.md |
--output | Change the output format. See Templates for more information. $ vale --output=JSON README.md |
--version | Print the version of Vale. $ vale --version |
Return codes
The vale CLI returns the following exit codes:
| Code | Description |
|---|---|
0 | No error(s) were found. |
1 | Linting error(s) were found. Useful for failing CI builds; can be disabled with --no-exit. |
2 | Runtime error(s) occurred. |
It will try to respect the value of --output when printing to stderr. For
example:
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