Monorepo linter

Linting a monorepo is a structural-validation problem, and most per-language linters punt on it. ESLint, Clippy, ruff, and golangci-lint all check the code inside a package; none of them check that your packages agree with each other. alint sits at the layer that sees the whole tree.

What alint catches that per-package linters miss

Cross-file rules. pair, for_each_dir, dir_contains, unique_by, every_matching_has express invariants that span packages. Every workspace member has a README.md; no two package.json files claim the same npm name; every crate marked publish = false is documented as such.
Cross-language conventions. In a polyglot tree (C++, Java, Python, Rust, Go, JS), no per-language linter sees the LICENSE-header shape, SPDX identifiers, .editorconfig compliance, or whether CODEOWNERS matches the actual directory layout.
Workspace-shape invariants. Every TS path-alias in tsconfig.json resolves to a real packages/<name>/ directory; the [workspace] members list in Cargo.toml matches what's on disk; lockfiles are committed where you said they would be.

alint is not a replacement for Bazel, Nx, or Turborepo. Those orchestrate builds. alint enforces conventions. They coexist cleanly.

Real monorepos using alint

Repo	Shape	What alint adds
vercel/next.js	Hybrid pnpm + Cargo dual-workspace	Surfaces 3 of 19 npm packages without license fields and 4 of 63 crates with non-canonical licenses, drift no per-language linter catches because each only sees half the tree.
apache/arrow	6 languages in one tree	21 lint hooks across 14 tool repos and 0 of them see cross-language structural shape. alint fills that gap.
pnpm/pnpm	169-package pnpm-workspace	Replaces 11 of 13 cross-package field invariants currently enforced by an in-tree 470-line `meta-updater` plugin, with no plugin install required.
pytorch/pytorch	~80k-file ML mega-monorepo	Sits beneath `lintrunner` as the structural floor; ~86% of lintrunner's 57 adapters are structural and map cleanly onto alint rules.
nixos/nixpkgs	39,101 files, 20,678 package dirs	Full 79-rule structural pass in 273 ms wall-clock, the empirical anchor for "fast at any size".
istio/istio	Go modules + 9 Helm charts	Helm-chart structural discipline that `helm lint` and golangci-lint don't reach: cross-chart field equality, release-note YAML shape, Dockerfile co-location.

Browse all 30 case studies → · See how alint compares to other repo-level linters →

Get started

The bundled monorepo@v1 ruleset covers the language-agnostic shape (every packages/* / crates/* / apps/* entry has a README.md; manifests where applicable). Layer ecosystem-specific overlays on top:

# .alint.yml
extends:
  - alint://bundled/monorepo@v1
  - alint://bundled/monorepo/cargo-workspace@v1   # if Cargo
  - alint://bundled/monorepo/pnpm-workspace@v1    # if pnpm
  - alint://bundled/monorepo/yarn-workspace@v1    # if yarn

# Pick up per-package .alint.yml files alongside the root.
nested_configs: true

nested_configs: true lets each package layer its own assertions on top of the root config without bloating it. This is the shovel-ready pattern for trees the size of nixpkgs.

One static binary, no Node/JVM/Docker runtime in your CI pipeline.

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