False Positives

False positives are inevitable, but we did our best to reduce their count.

If a false positive occurred, you have several choices.

Specific Linter Excludes

Most of the linters have a configuration, sometimes false-positives can be related to a bad configuration of a linter. So it’s recommended to check the linter configurations.

Otherwise, some linters have dedicated configuration to exclude or disable rules.

An example with staticcheck:

linters:
  settings:
    staticcheck:
      checks:
        - all
        - '-SA1000' # disable the rule SA1000
        - '-SA1004' # disable the rule SA1004

Exclude

Exclude Issue by Text

You can use linters.exclusions.rules config option for per-path or per-linter configuration.

In the following example, all the reports from the linters (linters) that contains the text (text) are excluded:

linters:
  exclusions:
    rules:
      - linters:
          - mnd
        text: "Magic number: 9"

In the following example, all the reports from the linters (linters) that originated from the source (source) are excluded:

linters:
  exclusions:
    rules:
      - linters:
          - lll
        source: "^//go:generate "

In the following example, all the reports that contains the text (text) in the path (path) are excluded:

linters:
  exclusions:
    rules:
      - path: path/to/a/file.go
        text: "string `example` has (\\d+) occurrences, make it a constant"

Exclude Issues by Path

Exclude issues in path by linters.exclusions.paths or linters.exclusions.rules config options.

In the following example, all the reports from the linters (linters) that concerns the path (path) are excluded:

linters:
  exclusions:
    rules:
      - path: '(.+)_test\.go'
        linters:
          - funlen
          - goconst

The opposite, excluding reports except for specific paths, is also possible. In the following example, only test files get checked:

linters:
  exclusions:
    rules:
      - path-except: '(.+)_test\.go'
        linters:
          - funlen
          - goconst

In the following example, all the reports related to the files (paths) are excluded:

linters:
  exclusions:
    paths:
      - path/to/a/file.go

In the following example, all the reports related to the directories (paths) are excluded:

linters:
  exclusions:
    paths:
      - path/to/a/dir/

Nolint Directive

To exclude issues from all linters use //nolint:all. For example, if it’s used inline (not from the beginning of the line) it excludes issues only for this line.

var bad_name int //nolint:all

To exclude issues from specific linters only:

var bad_name int //nolint:wsl,unused

To exclude issues for the block of code, use this directive at the beginning of a line:

//nolint:all
func allIssuesInThisFunctionAreExcluded() *string {
  // ...
}

//nolint:govet
var (
  a int
  b int
)

Also, you can exclude all issues in a file by:

//nolint:unparam
package pkg

You may add a comment explaining or justifying why a nolint directive is being used on the same line as the flag itself:

//nolint:gocyclo // This legacy function is complex, but the team too busy to simplify it
func someLegacyFunction() *string {
  // ...
}

You can see more examples of using nolint directives in our tests for it.

Syntax

nolint is not regular comment but a directive.

A directive comment is a line matching the regular expression //(line |extern |export |[a-z0-9]+:[a-z0-9]). https://go.dev/doc/comment#syntax

This means that no spaces are allowed between:

• // and nolint
• nolint and :
• : and the name of the linter.

Invalid syntax:

// nolint
// nolint:xxx
//nolint :xxx
//nolint: xxx

Valid syntax:

//nolint:xxx

Exclusion Presets

Some exclusions are considered common. To help golangci-lint users, those common exclusions are provided through presets.

linters:
  exclusions:
    presets:
      - comments
      - common-false-positives
      - legacy
      - std-error-handling

Preset comments

Preset common-false-positives

Preset legacy

Preset std-error-handling