VHDL Style Guide (VSG)

Coding style enforcement for VHDL.

Announcements

Update 01/18/2023

I will be swamped at work for the next couple of months so my availability to work on VSG will be reduced.

I will provide an update towards the end of March on when I can return.

Regards,

--Jeremy

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Key Benefits
• Key Features
• Known Limitations
• Installation
• Usage
• Documentation
• Contributing

Overview

VSG was created after participating in a code review where a real issue in the code was masked by a coding style issue. A finding was created for the style issue, while the real issue was missed. When the code was re-reviewed, the real issue was discovered.

Depending on your process, style issues can take a lot of time to resolve.

1. Create finding/ticket/issue
2. Disposition finding/ticket/issue
3. Fix
4. Verify fix

Spending less time on style issues leaves more time to analyze the substance of the code. This ultimately reduces the amount of time performing code reviews. It also allows reviewers to focus on the substance of the code. This will result in a higher quality code base.

Key Benefits

• Define VHDL coding standards
• Makes coding standards visible to everyone
• Improve code reviews
• Quickly bring code up to current standards

VSG allows the style of the code to be defined and enforced over part or the entire code base. Configurations allow for multiple coding standards.

Key Features

• Command line tool
  • integrate into continuous integration flow with JUnit output
• Reports and fixes issues found
  • whitespace
    • horizontal
    • vertical
  • upper and lower case
  • keyword alignments
  • etc...
• Fully configurable rules via JSON or YAML configuration file
  • Disable rules
  • Alter behavior of existing rules
• Localize rule sets
  • Create your own rules using python
  • Use existing rules as a template
  • Fully integrates into base rule set
• Built in styles
  • Use existing style or create your own

Known Limitations

VSG is a continual work in progress. As such, this version has the following known limitations:

• Parser will not process embedded PSL
• Parser will not process VHDL 2019

Installation

You can get the latest released version of VSG via pip.

pip install vsg

The latest development version can be cloned...

git clone https://github.com/jeremiah-c-leary/vhdl-style-guide.git

...and then installed locally...

python setup.py install

Usage

VSG is a both a command line tool and a python package. The command line tool can be invoked with:

$ vsg
usage: VHDL Style Guide (VSG) [-h] [-f FILENAME [FILENAME ...]] [-lr LOCAL_RULES] [-c CONFIGURATION [CONFIGURATION ...]] [--fix]
                              [-fp FIX_PHASE] [-j JUNIT] [-js JSON] [-of {vsg,syntastic,summary}] [-b] [-oc OUTPUT_CONFIGURATION]
                              [-rc RULE_CONFIGURATION] [--style {indent_only,jcl}] [-v] [-ap] [--fix_only FIX_ONLY] [-p JOBS]
                              [--debug]

Analyzes VHDL files for style guide violations. Reference documentation is located at: http://vhdl-style-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/index.html

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -f FILENAME [FILENAME ...], --filename FILENAME [FILENAME ...]
                        File to analyze
  -lr LOCAL_RULES, --local_rules LOCAL_RULES
                        Path to local rules
  -c CONFIGURATION [CONFIGURATION ...], --configuration CONFIGURATION [CONFIGURATION ...]
                        JSON or YAML configuration file(s)
  --fix                 Fix issues found
  -fp FIX_PHASE, --fix_phase FIX_PHASE
                        Fix issues up to and including this phase
  -j JUNIT, --junit JUNIT
                        Extract Junit file
  -js JSON, --json JSON
                        Extract JSON file
  -of {vsg,syntastic,summary}, --output_format {vsg,syntastic,summary}
                        Sets the output format.
  -b, --backup          Creates a copy of input file for comparison with fixed version.
  -oc OUTPUT_CONFIGURATION, --output_configuration OUTPUT_CONFIGURATION
                        Write configuration to file name.
  -rc RULE_CONFIGURATION, --rule_configuration RULE_CONFIGURATION
                        Display configuration of a rule
  --style {indent_only,jcl}
                        Use predefined style
  -v, --version         Displays version information
  -ap, --all_phases     Do not stop when a violation is detected.
  --fix_only FIX_ONLY   Restrict fixing via JSON file.
  -p JOBS, --jobs JOBS  number of parallel jobs to use, default is the number of cpu cores
  --debug               Displays verbose debug information

Here is an example output running against a test file:

Documentation

All documentation for VSG is hosted at read-the-docs.

Contributing

I welcome any contributions to this project. No matter how small or large.

There are several ways to contribute:

• Bug reports
• Code base improvements
• Feature requests
• Pull requests

Please refer to the documentation hosted at read-the-docs for more details on contributing.