A code style guide is a set of rules, standards, or best practices that outline how your team should write, format, and organize the source code. In a previous article, we covered what style guides are and why you need them in more detail.
Many programming languages have more than one recommended style guide, and JavaScript is no exception. To help you get started, here are 4 of the most popular style guides for JavaScript that will help your team write code in a consistent way and improve your coding standards.
4 popular JavaScript style guides
Idiomatic
Idiomatic is one of the most popular JavaScript style guides, and it’s open to pull requests, so you are free to contribute to it or adapt it to your own needs.
This style guide has been around for many years, and it consists of several rules to enforce your code style consistency, readability, and maintainability.
JavaScript Standard Style
The JavaScript Standard Style was released as open-source under an MIT license by Feross Abukhadijeh. It has a linter and a code fixer that allows you to format code automatically and easily detect bugs and style issues. Plus, you don’t need to maintain multiple style configuration files for every module or project you’re working on since no configuration is needed.
Using the JavaScript Standard Style is very simple. You can write the JavaScript code in your way and run it via the standard node package. To automatically format code, you’ll only need to run standard --fix, and the style guide will take care of your messy or inconsistent code. You can also quickly fix programmer errors, preventing back and forth between code contributors and reviewers.
Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide
The Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide was released in 2012, and it has the complete definition of coding standards used at Airbnb. It is known for its consistency, readability, predictability, and efficiency. This style guide covers nearly every aspect of JavaScript, from objects and events to testing and performance.
Since its release, this style guide has gained popularity, and it’s probably one of the most used and relevant style guides for many developers. If you don’t agree with some of the rules, you can use the Airbnb JavaScript Style Guide as a starting point and adapt it.
Google JavaScript Style Guide
The Google JavaScript Style Guide was released in 2012, and it has the complete definition of coding standards used at Google. This style guide has two parts, one focusing on style rules (aesthetic issues of formatting) and the other focusing on language rules (conventions and coding standards). In addition, it has an ESLint package that you can use to incorporate the style guide into your project.
Are you interested in this using this style guide? See how you can implement the Google JavaScript style guide with Codacy.
Other JavaScript style guides worth considering
Besides the 4 JavaScript style guides that we just covered, there are others that you might consider interesting:
- Code Conventions for the JavaScript programming language: a set of coding conventions and rules for JavaScript by Douglas Crockford, the author of How JavaScript Works.
- jQuery Core Style Guide: a module for jQuery developers to integrate and check whether their code is written according to the standard jQuery style guide.
- AngularJS Style Guide: a community-driven set of best practices for AngularJS application development.
- Clean Code JavaScript: the concepts of the book Clean Code, by Robert C. Martin, adapted for JavaScript.
- W3Schools JavaScript Style Guide: the general JavaScript code conventions used by W3Schools.
Conclusion
When you’re working in a large team with other developers, everyone will have their style of writing code because no two developers write code the same way. If you’ve got different developers writing code differently, your codebase will be almost impossible to understand. Also, onboarding new developers might be harder, as they won’t necessarily know which best approach to use.
This is where style guides come to the rescue. A style guide is a set of rules that developers follow when writing their code to ensure consistency among developers. In this article, we’ve covered 4 JavaScript style guides and presented 5 more for your consideration.
Share your favorite JavaScript style guide with us, and let’s keep the conversation going in our community.