Command Line Options

Introduction

reek follows standard Unix convention for passing arguments.

Check out

reek -h

for details.

Telling Reek Which Code to Check

Probably the most standard use case would be to check all ruby files in the lib directory:

reek lib/*.rb

In general, if any command-line argument is a directory, Reek searches that directory and all sub-directories for Ruby source files. Thus

reek lib

would be equivalent to

reek lib/**/*.rb

Occasionally you may want to quickly check a code snippet without going to the trouble of creating a file to hold it. You can pass the snippet directly to Reek's standard input:

echo "def x() true end" | reek

Output options

Output smell's line number

By passing in a "-n" flag to the reek command, the output will suppress the line numbers:

$ reek -n mess.rb

mess.rb -- 2 warnings:
  x doesn't depend on instance state (UtilityFunction)
  x has the name 'x' (UncommunicativeMethodName)

Otherwise line numbers will be shown as default at the beginning of each warning in square brackets:

$ reek mess.rb

mess.rb -- 2 warnings:
  [2]:x doesn't depend on instance state (UtilityFunction)
  [2]:x has the name 'x' (UncommunicativeMethodName)

Enable the ultra-verbose mode

reek has a ultra-verbose mode which you might find helpful as a beginner. "ultra-verbose" just means that behind each warning a helpful link will be displayed which leads directly to the corresponding reek wiki page. This mode can be enabled via the "-U" or "--ultra-verbose" flag.

So for instance, if your test file would smell of ClassVariable, this is what the reek output would look like:

reek -U test.rb 

test.rb -- 1 warning:
  [2]:Dummy declares the class variable @@class_variable (ClassVariable) [https://github.com/troessner/reek/wiki/Class-Variable]

Note the link at the end.