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Introduction to our use of Vale

Contents

What is Vale?

According to its website at https://vale.sh/, "Vale is an open-source, command-line tool that brings your editorial style guide to life."

It provides spell checking, but also allows the definition and use of "styles", which can be used to look for common mistakes in text.

Vale runs on Mac, Linux and Windows, and instructions for downloading it, for all three platforms, are at https://vale.sh/docs/vale-cli/installation/

We use Vale in two ways:

  1. At the command line, with the make spell command - this checks the top-level index.rst file, and all the .rst files in the docs directory.
  2. In a GitHub action, which is run automatically in PRs.

If you get an error running vale

Occasionally, when running the vale command (for instance, via make spell) you may get an error like:

E100 [docs/platform/concepts/cloud-security.rst] Runtime error

Post "http://localhost:7069": dial tcp [::1]:7069: connect: connection refused

If so, just run the command again - it appears to be transitory.

The organisation of our Vale setup

The top-level file .vale.ini specifies

  • where the vale style files can be found (.github/vale/styles)
  • what files to check (.rst files)
  • what styles to use (our own Aiven style)

The GitHub action's workflow is specified in .github/workflows/lint.yaml.

Common replacements

The file styles/Aiven/common_replacements.yml provides corrections for things we think are likely to be common mistakes. This includes common misspellings (kakfa instead of Kafka), getting capitalisation wrong (it should be ClickHouse), and forgetting the for in Aiven for <product>.

Sentence case headings

Our style guide says that headings should be in "Sentence case". The styles/Aiven/capitalization_headings.yml file contains the rules and exceptions for this.

Why exceptions? Vale doesn't actually insist that "Sentence case" titles contain no capitalised words after the first, but the way it calculates what to allow is not obvious, so sometimes it is necessary to add exceptions, to say "it is OK for this word to be capitalised in a title".

Spell checking

Vale ships with an American dictionary (the source is at https://github.com/errata-ai/en_US-web).

The file styles/Aiven/aiven_spelling.yml adds our own dictionary, so that we can define extra vocabulary. This Aiven dictionary is specified in the file dicts/aiven.dic.

Vale will look in the default dictionary first, and then in the Aiven dictionary.

If you need to edit the Aiven dictionary

The very first line of dicts/aiven.dic is a count of the number of entries. Please try to keep it up-to-date.

If you don't care about the case of the word, then just put it in the dictionary in lower-case. For instance, fakeword will match fakeword, Fakeword and fakeWORD.

If you enter the word in mixedCase, then it won't match a lower-case word, but it also won't forbid the "wrong" mixed-case (for instance, MixedCase). If you care about the specific use of capital letters in a word, it's better to use the Common Replacements file to be specific about how it should appear.

We try not to add words that are actually commands, for instance jq or wget.

Checking registered trademark usage

It is correct and polite to put the ® (registered trademark) character after particular product names, in at least the first and most prominent use on a page. Style files with names like styles/Aiven/first_Flink_is_registered.yml check for this.

Note: they're not perfect yet, so may not always catch all cases, and may not insist that the product name with ® comes before other uses. We will be making improvements in this area.

Test files

Some simple testing of our Aiven style is provided.

In the directory tests there are pairs of files, with names that contain good and bad.

When Vale is run on a good file, there should be no errors, and when it is run on a bad file there should be at least one error per line (ignoring comments and blank lines).

I recommend using vale --output=line for its more compact output format.

To make it easier to see changes and regressions, the file .vale/test/shelltest.test can be used with shelltestrunner.

For instance:

brew install shelltestrunner
shelltest --diff .github/vale/tests/shelltest.test