Configuration file

By default, luacheck tries to load configuration from .luacheckrc file in the current directory. Path to config can be set using --config option. Config loading can be disabled using --no-config flag.

Config is simply a Lua script executed by luacheck. It may set various options by assigning to globals.

Config options

Option	Type	Default value
color	Boolean	true
codes	Boolean	false
limit	Number	0
global	Boolean	true
unused	Boolean	true
redefined	Boolean	true
unused_args	Boolean	true
unused_values	Boolean	true
unset	Boolean	true
unused_secondaries	Boolean	true
std	String or array of strings	"_G"
globals	Array of strings	{}
new_globals	Array of strings	(Do not overwrite)
read_globals	Array of strings	{}
new_read_globals	Array of strings	(Do not overwrite)
compat	Boolean	false
allow_defined	Boolean	false
allow_defined_top	Boolean	false
module	Boolean	false
unused_globals	Boolean	true
ignore	Array of patterns (see Patterns)	{}
enable	Array of patterns	{}
only	Array of patterns	(Do not filter)

An example of a config which makes luacheck ensure that only globals from the portable intersection of Lua 5.1, Lua 5.2, Lua 5.3 and LuaJIT 2.0 are used, as well as disables detection of unused arguments:

std = "min"
ignore = {"211"}

Per-prefix overrides

The environment in which luacheck loads the config contains a special global files. When checking a file <path>, luacheck will override options from the main config with entries from files[<path_prefix>], applying entries for shorter prefixes first. This allows to override options for a specific file by setting files[<path>], and for all files in a directory by setting files[<dir>/]. For example, the following config re-enables detection of unused arguments only for files in src/dir, but not for src/dir/myfile.lua:

std = "min"
ignore = {"211"}

files["src/dir/"] = {
   enable = {"211"}
}

files["src/dir/myfile.lua"] = {
   ignore = {"211"}
}

Note that files table supports autovivification, so that

files["myfile.lua"].ignore = {"211"}

and

files["myfile.lua"] = {
   ignore = {"211"}
}

are equivalent.