📜 The SQL Linter for Humans

Bored of not having a good SQL linter that works with whichever dialect you’re working with? Fluff is an extensible and modular linter designed to help you write good SQL and catch errors and bad SQL before it hits your database.

Note

SQLFluff is still in an open Beta phase - expect potentially non-backward compatible api changes to happen with releases (particularly when major or minor version numbers increase).

Notable changes:

  • 0.1.x involved a major re-write of the parser, completely changing the behaviour of the tool with respect to complex parsing.

  • 0.2.x added templating support and a big restructure of rules and changed how users might interact with SQLFluff on templated code.

  • 0.3.x drops support for python 2.7 and 3.4, and also reworks the handling of indentation linting in a potentially not backward compatible way.

  • 0.4.x dropped python 3.5, added the dbt templater, source mapping and also introduced the python API.

  • 0.5.x introduced some breaking changes to the API.

  • 0.6.x introduced parallel processing, which necessitated a big re-write of several innards.

  • 0.7.x extracted the dbt templater to a separate plugin and removed the exasol_fs dialect (now merged in with the main exasol).

  • 0.8.x an improvement to the performance of the parser, a rebuild of the Jinja Templater, and a progress bar for the CLI.

  • 0.9.x refinement of the Simple API, dbt 1.0.0 compatibility, and the official SQLFluff Docker image.

  • 0.10.x removed support for older dbt versions < 0.20 and stopped fix attempting to fix unparsable SQL.

  • 0.11.x rule L030 changed to use extended_capitalisation_policy.

  • 0.12.x dialect is now mandatory, the spark3 dialect was renamed to sparksql and datatype capitalisation was extracted from L010 to it’s own rule L063.

  • 0.13.x new rule for quoted literals, option to remove hanging indents in rule L003, and introduction of ignore_words_regex.

Want to see where and how people are using SQLFluff in their projects? Head over to SQLFluff in the Wild for inspiration.

Getting Started

To get started just install the package, make a sql file and then run SQLFluff and point it at the file. For more details or if you don’t have python or pip already installed see Getting Started.

$ pip install sqlfluff
$ echo "  SELECT a  +  b FROM tbl;  " > test.sql
$ sqlfluff lint test.sql
== [test.sql] FAIL
L:   1 | P:   1 | L003 | Single indentation uses a number of spaces not a multiple of 4
L:   1 | P:  14 | L006 | Operators should be surrounded by a single space unless at the start/end of a line
L:   1 | P:  27 | L001 | Unnecessary trailing whitespace

Contents

Documentation for SQLFluff:

Indices and tables