varar lint

varar lint checks your oaths against the step definitions they bind to, without running anything. It parses and plans every oath the config discovers, using the same registry your test runner uses — so it sees what the runner would see, minus the execution.

varar lint            # the corpus varar.config.json discovers
varar lint 'docs/**/*.md'   # only these oaths (include-only override)
varar lint --json     # machine-readable

What it checks

Code	Severity	What it means
`ambiguous-match`	error	Two or more step definitions match one sentence. Varar refuses to guess, so the example cannot run.
`error-fence-without-step`	error	An expected-to-fail `error` fence sits on an example with no step to produce that failure.
`orphan-step`	warning	A step definition no sentence in any oath matches — dead code, usually the far half of a rename.

Because lint loads your step files to build that registry, anything that stops them loading — a syntax error, a failed import, two definitions registering the same expression — fails the command with that error rather than a diagnostic.

What it never flags

A sentence that matches no step definition. That is prose, and prose is the point: an oath is a document that happens to be executable, so most of its sentences are documentation and Varar stays quiet about them. There is no “undefined step” list here, and its absence is deliberate — see Varar for Cucumber users.

The regression that would worry you — a sentence that used to be an example and silently stopped matching — is caught by drift detection against varar.lock.json, which knows what used to run. Lint has no such memory.

Exit code

Code	When
`0`	No errors. Warnings do not fail the command.
`1`	At least one error-severity diagnostic, or the config or step files could not be loaded.

That makes varar lint usable as a CI gate on its own:

- run: varar lint

Orphan warnings never break the build. They are reported only when both:

you linted the whole configured corpus — a glob argument narrows the oaths, which would make every step the excluded documents use look dead; and
nothing else reported an error — one ambiguous sentence leaves all of its candidate definitions unmatched, and listing them as orphans on top of the ambiguity is noise. Fix the errors, then ask about orphans.

Output

One line per diagnostic, path:line:column severity code message, with paths relative to the working directory:

varar/division.md:3:1  error  ambiguous-match  Ambiguous step: "I divide 6 by 3"
src/varar/greeting.steps.ts:8:1  warning  orphan-step  No sentence in any oath matches this step: "I wave at {string}".

--json writes one object instead, with the message unabridged:

{
  "diagnostics": [
    {
      "path": "varar/division.md",
      "severity": "error",
      "code": "ambiguous-match",
      "line": 3,
      "col": 1,
      "message": "Ambiguous step: \"I divide 6 by 3\"\nMatched by:\n  'I divide {int} by {int}'    at src/varar/division.steps.ts:5\n  'I divide 6 by {int}'    at src/varar/division.steps.ts:7"
    }
  ]
}

This is lint output — plan diagnostics about your source. It is a different thing from the run results a run writes to .varar/<oath>.json, which record what happened when the examples executed.