ReviewDog reporter for Mega-Linter

[nvuillam]

Hi, I am the maintainer of Mega-Linter, a linters aggregator for CI which embeds more than 70 linters that are run when applicable by CI (GitHub Actions and other CI tools )

During the run, I keep all logs from linters.

In your opinion:

• how complicated would it be to integrate Mega-Linter with review dog ?
• would it be possible to call reviewdog in "bulk" mode, to improve performances ? (i'm afraid to decrease them too much if I call it once by linter results)

Many thanks for your suppport :)

[ewencluley]

I would love this to be possible. I had spent some time looking at trying to get super-linter working with reviewdog but the main issue seemed to be that every different linter output is in a different format. Ive not tried megalinter yet but it actually seems a better fit in many regards (esp with the various flavours to avoid the super-linter 4GB image). I'm assuming the same variation in the linter output format would be present in megalinter too.

I was looking at writing parsers for the linter outputs to get them into a common format and then I was planning to cat the formatted outputs together and feed into reviewdog.

I guess the other approach would be to add input formats to reviewdog that were specific to the various linters but I felt that a consolidated output format from the linters would be a more flexible approach.

Im happy to work on this further (unless anyone has any better ideas) but while simple enough its probably going to be quite timeconsuming.

[nvuillam]

As far as I understand, ReviewDog can work with default format of linter reporters
Mega-Linter generates standalone files (or even strings) with the output of each linter
We can define custom reporters:

• for whole Mega-Linter
• for each linter

Starting from that, do you think it could be doable ?

I'd be glad to provide all support necessary, but I don't have myself a lot of time to implement myself for now (new job very time consuming)

[ewencluley]

Apologies for the delay in replying, had a busy week. Going to make some time tomorrow to look at this.

As long as we can get the output from mega linter to be consistent I think it would be possible. I think a good starting point for me would be to work out which output formats each linter in megalinter supports. If there are some commonalities between the supported formats then that would make it more straightforward.

For example checkstyle and hadolint both support checkstyle output format and review dog supports checkstyle input format. With this in mind it might be easiest to make megalinter reporters that produce a checkstyle compatible output. There may be some format that is supported even more broadly across linters, I will need to investigate.

Will be looking at this over in spare time between work so might take a while to get done.

[ewencluley]

I have opened a draft PR oxsecurity/megalinter#377 with a reporter that would output the Reviewdog JSONL format. Currently only supporting Flake8 and Black linters but will add more if the approach is deemed reasonable.