// guide

Setup dprint

After installing, the main part of getting setup is to create a dprint.json/dprint.jsonc, or hidden .dprint.json/.dprint.jsonc file in your project.

This file will outline:

  1. The plugins to use.
  2. The configuration to use for formatting files.
  3. Which files to include and exclude from formatting.

Quick Setup

Using the dprint init command is a quick way to get setup formatting your project.

Open a terminal in the root directory of your project and run the following command:

dprint init

This will create a dprint.json file in the current working directory. If you are connected to the internet, it will prompt you to select from the latest plugins, pre-selecting the ones that match the files found in the current directory. Use the spacebar to toggle a plugin, type to filter the list, and press enter when finished. Press the right arrow on a plugin to change which files it formats and its options, and hold shift with the up or down arrow to change the order of the selected plugins.

If the directory already has a configuration file, dprint init adds the selected plugins to it instead.

Init preferences

If you find yourself making the same choices every time you run dprint init, you can save them by running:

dprint init --preferences

This opens a prompt that only changes your preferences, without creating a configuration file or looking at the files in the current directory. Press the spacebar on a plugin to cycle it between preferred, avoided, and neither.

  • Preferred plugins are pre-selected ahead of other plugins that format the same files, in the order you put them. For example, preferring Biome means it's selected instead of the TypeScript plugin in a project with TypeScript files. Press the right arrow on a preferred plugin to choose which files it formats and the options it's initialized with.
  • Avoided plugins are never pre-selected and are listed last, so the next plugin for their files is selected instead. They can still be selected manually.

Press enter to save or escape to cancel. In the dprint init prompt, preferred plugins are marked with ★ and avoided ones with ✗.

The preferences are saved to an init.json file in the global configuration directory and are used by dprint init from then on, including with --yes.

Non-interactive init

Pass the --yes or -y flag to skip the prompt and accept the plugins selected based on the files in the current directory. This is useful in scripts:

dprint init --yes

The prompt is also skipped automatically when there is no interactive terminal.

Manual Setup

Create a dprint.json/dprint.jsonc or hidden .dprint.json/.dprint.jsonc file in the root directory of the project and read the configuration documentation.

Hidden Config File

The dprint CLI supports a default hidden configuration at .dprint.json or .dprint.jsonc.

.config Directory

To keep it out of the root directory of the project, the configuration file may instead be placed in a .config directory at .config/dprint.json or .config/dprint.jsonc. The .config directory is treated as part of its parent directory, so the configuration file applies to the parent directory and is found when running dprint from anywhere within it, including from within the .config directory.

Custom Config File Location

It is recommended to use an auto-discoverable dprint configuration file name (ex. dprint.json) as the location of your configuration file because it will be automatically picked up by the CLI and editor plugins. If you place it in another other location then it will need to be manually specified using the --config <path> or -c <path> flag whenever you run a command.

dprint init with custom config file location

You may specify a custom path for the creation of a configuration file via dprint init by specifying it with the -c or --config flag.

dprint init --config .dprint.jsonc
dprint init --config path/to/dprint.json

Global Config File

See global configuration

Custom Cache Directory

By default, dprint stores information in the current system user's cache directory (~/.cache/dprint on Linux, ~/Library/Caches/dprint on Mac, and %LOCALAPPDATA%/dprint on Windows) such as cached plugins and incremental formatting information. If you would like to store the cache in a custom location, then specify a DPRINT_CACHE_DIR environment variable. Note that this directory may be periodically deleted by the CLI, so if you set it please make sure it's set correctly and you're ok with the custom directory being deleted.

Proxy

You may specify a proxy for dprint to use when downloading plugins or configuration files by setting the HTTPS_PROXY/https_proxy and HTTP_PROXY/http_proxy environment variables. http://, https://, and socks proxies are supported.

Additionally, the NO_PROXY/no_proxy environment variable can be set, which is a comma-separated list of hosts which should not use the proxy.

Requests to an npm registry for npm plugins use the proxy npm is configured with instead when there is one. See Private npm registries.

TLS Certificates

dprint downloads plugins via HTTPS. In some cases you may wish to configure this. This is possible via the following environment variables:

  • DPRINT_CERT - Load certificate authority from PEM encoded file.
  • DPRINT_TLS_CA_STORE - Comma-separated list of order dependent certificate stores.
    • Possible values: mozilla and system
    • Defaults to mozilla,system

Requires dprint >= 0.46.0

Unsafely ignoring certificates

You can unsafely ignore all or some TLS certificates via the DPRINT_IGNORE_CERTS environment variable:

  • DPRINT_IGNORE_CERTS=1 - Ignore all TLS certificates.
  • DPRINT_IGNORE_CERTS=dprint.dev,localhost,[::],127.0.0.1 - Ignore certs from the specified hosts.

This is very unsafe to do and not recommended. A warning will be displayed on first download when this is done.

Limiting Parallelism

By default, dprint only runs for a short period of time and so it will try to take advantage of as many CPU cores as it can. This might be an issue in some scenarios, and so you can limit the amount of parallelism by setting the DPRINT_MAX_THREADS environment variable in version 0.32 and up (ex. DPRINT_MAX_THREADS=4).

Separately, dprint reads directories on several threads when discovering files in order to better saturate the disk. This is I/O bound, so the number of read threads is independent of DPRINT_MAX_THREADS. You can override it with the DPRINT_GLOB_READ_THREADS environment variable (ex. DPRINT_GLOB_READ_THREADS=8), though the default is suitable for most setups.

Next step: Configuration