I can get a bit obsessive with the way the code is formatted and styled not only in a team setting but in my own personal projects. Something that I took note of along the way is that I really liked by imports at the beginning of the file being ordered in a specific way:

1. Dependencies / Built-in modules (eg ‘react’, ‘react-router-dom’)
2. Internal routes of absolute folders (eg ‘components’, ‘assets’)
3. Relative routes (eg ./, ../)

And within those same subcategories, I also wanted it to be alphabetical.

ESLINT

With ESLint there are two options to flag errors or warnings when the imports are set in an incorrect order: sort-imports and with the help of a plugin eslint-plugin-import another rule with the name import/order.

sort-imports

sort-imports offers a way to alphabetically organize the imports using the declarations or the members of the declaration. For example:

Will become:

Great! We can also add a few options to ignore letter cases. In order to hook up this to ESLint we have to add a rule in the ESLint config file:

  "rules": {      // ..other rules,      "sort-imports":      [       "error",        {          "ignoreCase": true,          "ignoreDeclarationSort": true        }     ],   }   

You may have noticed I am ignored declaration sort here. This is intentional, we are going to have a more nuanced approach to sorting the declarations using eslint-plugin-import.

import/orders

For this to work the ESLint plugin must first be installed:

  yarn add eslint-plugin-import --dev   

Great! It offers a rule configuration to get very granular about how we want our imports to look. We can first differentiate the groups of our imports and split them up by groups:

  "rules: {      // ..other rules,      "import/order":  [     1,      { "groups":          [           "external",            "builtin",            "internal",            "sibling",            "parent",            "index"         ],      }    ]    }   

This will split the imports by the groups we specified at the beginning! Great! However, when using aliases with Typescript a few of our imports can be confused with dependencies. This particular rule can help us circumvent these particular edge cases by specifying something called pathGroups.

  "groups": [     "external",      "builtin",      "internal",      "sibling",      "parent",      "index"  ],  "pathGroups": [     {        "pattern": "components",        "group": "internal"      },      {        "pattern": "common",        "group": "internal"      },      {        "pattern": "routes/ **",        "group": "internal"      },      {        "pattern": "assets/**",        "group": "internal",        "position": "after"      }  ],  "pathGroupsExcludedImportTypes":     ["internal"],     "alphabetize": {        "order": "asc",        "caseInsensitive": true     }   

Great now it will consider those aliased folders under the group internal!

As part of the linting process you could now run:

  yarn lint --fix   

And it’ll fix all import sorting warnings.

Share any configurations you use for sorting imports in the comments below!

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Originally published at https://relatablecode.com on October 10, 2021.