No two developers write code the same way. Indeed, in a large team of developers, everyone codes with their own style preferences.

In terms of functionality, there is no problem with these personal approaches. After all, the code works, and your JavaScript program runs smoothly. However, individual preferences make it impossible to read large codebases, making them difficult to manage and maintain.

Therefore, big enterprises establish some code styling rules to make the entire codebase consistent and easier to read. But what is a style guide, exactly? Keep on reading to know more about style guides and how you can set up the Google JavaScript style guide with Codacy.

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 an ideal world, your team’s source code should look like it was written by a single person, even if hundreds of developers collaborated on it. 

A team following the same style guide has superpowers. Being consistent with a style guide makes your code easier to read, debug, and maintain. It is also smoother to add new features or update legacy code, and new developers have an easier integration with the team.

What’s included in a code style guide?

• Naming and declaration rules for constants, variables, and functions;
• Rules for the use of white spaces, indentation, vertical alignment, and comments;
• Folder naming, asset naming, source file structures, and folder hierarchy;
• Best programming practices and principles, focusing on conventions and coding standards.

What are the advantages of code style guides?

• Quick readability and understanding of any codebase through familiar formats;
• Streamlined code creation and maintenance, with higher code quality;
• Straightforward scaling and implementation of automation; and
• Easier to cope with change, like product ownership transfer, onboarding new people, or code handoffs.

The Google JavaScript style guide is one of the most popular code style guides. It was released back in 2012, and it has the complete definition of coding standards used at Google.

One way of making sure you and your team use the Google style guide is by using an automated code review tool that runs analysis on your commits and PRs. We’ll show you how to create these rules in Codacy so you can have the same standards as Google.

The Google JavaScript style guide provides best practices related to source file basics, source file structure, formatting, language features, naming conventions, and JSDoc.

It can be a lot to tackle, and that’s where a static analysis tool like Codacy can help. We use rules from 3 main tools for JavaScript: ESLint, JSHint, and PMD. Let’s see how you can set them up to follow the Google JavaScript style guide.

Set up ESLint rules in Codacy

In Codacy, ESLint has 1495 code style rules for JavaScript related to