A flexible JSON linter with out of the box support for OpenAPI v2 and v3.

Spectral Features

• Create custom rules to lint JSON or YAML objects
• Ready to use rules to validate and lint OpenAPI v2 and v3 documents
• Use JSON path to apply rules to specific parts of your objects
• Built-in set of functions to help create custom rules. Functions include pattern checks, parameter checks, alphabetical ordering, a specified number of characters, provided keys are present in an object, etc.
• Create custom functions for advanced use cases
• Validate JSON with Ajv

Installation

npm install -g @stoplight/spectral

# OR

yarn global add @stoplight/spectral

For more installation options, see Getting Started > Installation

Getting Started

After installation take a look at our getting started documentation.

• Adding a rule
• Extending rulesets
• Enable only specific rules
• Disable specific rules
• Changing the severity of a rule
• Using the JavaScript API
• Creating custom functions

FAQs

How is this different to AJV

Ajv is a JSON Schema validator, and Spectral is a JSON/YAML linter. Instead of just validating against JSON Schema, it can be used to write rules for any sort of JSON/YAML object, which could be JSON Schema, or OpenAPI, or anything similar. Spectral does expose a schema function that you can use in your rules to validate all or part of the target object with JSON Schema (we even use Ajv used under the hood for this), but that's just one of many functions.

I want to lint my OpenAPI documents but don't want to implement Spectral right now.

No problem! A hosted version of Spectral comes free with the Stoplight platform. Sign up for a free account here.

What is the difference between Spectral and Speccy

Speccy was a great inspiration for Spectral, but was designed to work only with OpenAPI v3. Spectral can apply rules to any JSON/YAML object (including OpenAPI v2 and v3) through the use of JSONPath given parameters. Some rule types have been enhanced to be a little more flexible along with being able to create your own rules based on the built-in functions, and we've added the ability to define custom functions too.

Contributing

If you are interested in contributing to Spectral itself, check out our contributing docs to get started.

If you are using Spectral in your project and want to be listed in the examples section, we encourage you to open an issue.

Example Implementations

• Stoplight's Custom Style and Validation Rules uses Spectral to validate and lint OpenAPI documents on the Stoplight platform
• Spectral GitHub Bot, a GitHub pull request bot that lints your repo's OpenAPI document that uses the Probot framework, built by Taylor Barnett
• Spectral GitHub Action, a GitHub Action that lints your repo's OpenAPI document, built by Vincenzo Chianese

Helpful Links

• JSONPath Online Evaluator, a helpful tool to determine what given path you want
• stoplightio/json, a library of useful functions for when working with JSON
• stoplightio/yaml, a library of useful functions for when working with YAML, including parsing YAML into JSON, and a few helper functions such as getJsonPathForPosition or getLocationForJsonPath

Thanks

• Mike Ralphson for kicking off the Spectral CLI and his work on Speccy
• Jamund Ferguson for JUnit formatter
• Sindre Sorhus for Stylish formatter
• Julian Laval for HTML formatter

Support

If you have a bug or feature request, please create an issue.

If you need help using Spectral or have a support question, please use the Stoplight Community forum. We've created an open source category for these questions. It's also a great place to share your implementations.

If you want to discuss something in private, you can reach out to Stoplight support at [email protected].