gems/rubocop-canvas/README.md
This is an extension of the RuboCop gem that provides some extra linters ("cops") that might be handy, and that provides a neat way to do inline commenting in gerrit as a result of linted source.
You don't really have to do anything if you're at Instructure! The linter runs automatically on the CI server, using the diff-tree from the HEAD commit to decide what files to look at. Then it takes the linted warnings, compares them to the lines you changed (based on chunk headers in "git show"), and posts them as inline gerrit comments via gergich.
No problem, you can still benefit from rubocop-canvas. In the "script" directory of canvas-lms, there's a little glue code called "rlint", just an executable that does some git-fu to get the right files, and then will print out linting information for your most recent change right to your console. Fix and repeat. :)
You may have several ideas of things you want to do:
It doesn't make sense to lint database migrations as aggressively as the rest of the source code, for example, so with the config file in "db/migrate/.rubocop.yml" we turn off several linters that we might still want elsewhere
Are you sure you aren't just frustrated at how much messy code you've written? ;) Ok, ok, you can screw with the config file in the root directory of canvas-lms (".rubocop.yml") there are already examples in there of linters that have been disabled because they're just too much noise.
Have you discovered some new thing that we should try to detect automatically from now on? Have a look at "no_sleep.rb" in this project, you could build something similar for whatever it is you need. Checkout all the callbacks that are available for Cops at https://github.com/bbatsov/rubocop, don't forget to write specs!
Also, don't forget to enable your new cop by default in "config/default.yml"