Sonarwhal renamed to Webhint

A little over a year ago I wrote a post about testing your website with sonarwhal, a new tool I’d heard about for testing you website for security, performance and accessibility issues.  I then followed that up with a post about sonarwhal via the command line.

I did promise to go through and fix all the issues that it had raised on my site, writing a post about each one and how I resolved it… which hasn’t happened.  Sorry about that, maybe one day!

For now, I’m incredibly late to the party to announce that sonarwhal has become webhint.

If you’ve been using the web version, you’ll have already noticed because the website redirects to the new address.  If you’ve still using the old sonarwhal NPM package then you need to follow the advice on their deprecation notice…

The ‘sonarwhal’ project has been renamed to ‘webhint’ (https://webhint.io/). Please update your dependencies to use ‘hint’ package (https://www.npmjs.com/package/hint).

You can do that easily enough with the following lines…

npm uninstall -g sonarwhal
npm install -g --engine-strict hint

Then you’ll want to update your require statement as well, and if you rename the variable or constant in the process, make sure you update all the tasks that call it as well.

I really do want to find time to run this tool on the sites that I maintain and get issues resolved, as it does come up with some really good suggestions, I’d thoroughly recommend it.