Skip to content

Installation

Jump to bottom
Alexander Liberov edited this page Oct 16, 2026 · 2 revisions

Installation

One-step alternative: Setup installer installs all of it -- engine, charts, Graphviz, plugin, YADF -- with one exe (experimental).

drag-lint has three faces, and they install independently. Most people want the first two.

  1. CLI -- the engine. Everything else spawns it.
  2. RAD Studio plugin -- the drag-lint menu, hover, dockable panels.
  3. Language server -- for VS Code, Neovim, Helix, Zed.

1. CLI

  1. Download drag-lint-vX.Y.Z-win64.zip from Releases. Win64 is the supported target; a Win32 build exists but is a frozen fallback.

  2. Unzip the whole folder and keep every file together:

    drag-lint.exe                 the tool
tree-sitter-delphi13.dll      } parser DLLs -- MUST sit next to the exe
tree-sitter-dfm.dll           }
tree-sitter.dll               }
rules\                        external lint rules (*.scm + *.json)
  builtin-symbols.txt

  3. Optionally add the folder to PATH, or call the exe by full path.

Two things that break a fresh install

rules\ must sit beside the exe. The .scm rules load from <exe-dir>\rules. Move the exe without the folder and the external rules silently stop loading -- the built-in checks still run, so you get fewer findings rather than an error. Use --rules-dir <path> if you must separate them.

The tree-sitter DLLs must be the matching bitness. A Win64 exe that finds Win32 parser DLLs on PATH dies at process start with 0xC000007B (STATUS_INVALID_IMAGE_FORMAT). That is a bitness mismatch, not a missing DLL (0xC0000135), which is why it does not look like a staging problem.

Verify

.\drag-lint.exe --version
.\drag-lint.exe rules            # the full, always-current rule catalogue

2. Build your first index

The linter works on a bare .pas file, but navigation, callers, impact analysis and documentation all need an index.

.\drag-lint.exe index C:\path\to\project --db myapp.sqlite
.\drag-lint.exe query --name TMyClass --db myapp.sqlite

For real use, prefer the manifest so commands find databases themselves -- see Maintenance.

3. RAD Studio plugin

The plugin is a design-time package, dclDragLintWizard.bpl. It adds a top-level drag-lint menu to the IDE menu bar (falling back to Tools if the main menu is unavailable) and two dockable windows under View > Tool Windows.

Install

  1. Close all RAD Studio instances. A design-time BPL cannot be replaced while the IDE holds it.
  2. Copy the BPL and the CLI (with its DLLs and rules\) to a folder of your choice.
  3. In RAD Studio: Component > Install Packages > Add..., select dclDragLintWizard.bpl.
  4. Restart the IDE. A drag-lint item appears in the menu bar.

It needs the CLI

The plugin does not contain the engine -- it spawns drag-lint.exe. If the menu items fail, check that the exe is reachable and still has rules\ beside it. drag-lint > Open Plugin Log shows what the plugin actually invoked.

Bitness

The IDE is 32-bit, but the plugin spawns the Win64 CLI by default: the 64-bit engine handles large indexes that the 32-bit one cannot (it runs out of address space on multi-gigabyte databases). The BPL is the only 32-bit artifact.

4. Editors (LSP)

drag-lint ships a stdio language server:

drag-lint lsp

It provides hover, go-to-definition, find-references, workspace symbols, completion and signature help from the index -- across every project in the manifest at once. Find-references and workspace-symbols are not duplicated by DelphiLSP, which does not implement them.

  • VS Code -- extension included at editors\vscode\drag-lint\.
  • Neovim / Helix / anything else -- point the client at drag-lint lsp over stdio.
  • Zed -- syntax highlighting works today via the tree-sitter grammars; registering the language server needs a small Rust/WASM extension that is specified but not built.

Full settings and the Rust extension spec: docs/EDITORS.md in the repository.

Suppressing a finding

A line comment on the offending line:

Q.SQL.Text := 'SELECT * FROM t WHERE id=' + Id;  // drag-lint:ignore sql-injection-concat
X := X;                                          // drag-lint:ignore   <- all rules

For a finding a human has reviewed and accepted, prefer the reviewed marker, which is self-invalidating -- it carries a hash of the line's code tokens and re-reports itself if the code changes:

except // dl:ok bare-except@7f3a -- rethrown by the caller

Reindentation and case changes do not invalidate it; a real edit does.

Clone this wiki locally