• Custom Rulesets: Create custom rules to lint JSON or YAML objects
• Ready-to-use Rulesets: Validate and lint OpenAPI v2 & v3 and AsyncAPI Documents
• JSON Path Support: Use JSON path to apply rules to specific parts of your objects
• Ready-to-use Functions: 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.
• Custom Functions: Create custom functions for advanced use cases
• JSON Validation: Validate JSON with Ajv

• Installation and Usage
• Documentation
• Support
• FAQs
• Contributing

Install

npm install -g @stoplight/spectral-cli

# OR

yarn global add @stoplight/spectral-cli

Find more installation methods in our documentation.

Create a Ruleset

Spectral, being a generic YAML/JSON linter, needs a ruleset in order to be able to lint files. You can learn more about the rulesets here.

If you intend to lint an OpenAPI or AsyncAPI document, we have a few predefined rulesets you can extend to get Spectral up and running. To reference them, you can run the following command:

printf '{\n  "extends": ["spectral:oas", "spectral:asyncapi"]\n}\n' > .spectral.json

Lint

spectral lint petstore.yaml

• Documentation
  • Getting Started - The basics of Spectral.
  • Different Workflows - When and where should you use Spectral? Editors, Git-hooks, Continuous Integration, GitHub Actions, wherever you like!
  • Using the command-line interface - Quickest way to get going with Spectral is in the CLI.
  • Using the JavaScript API - Access the raw power of Spectral via the JS, or hey, TypeScript if you want.
  • Custom Rulesets - Don't like our rules? Throw 'em out and make your own.
  • Custom Functions - Rules can do absolutely anything, just write a little code. Take a look at our getting started documentation, then peek through some of our guides:

If you need help using Spectral or have any questions, please use GitHub Discussions, or visit the Stoplight Community Discord. These communities are a great place to share your rulesets, or show off tools that leverage Spectral.

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

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.

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

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/v3 and AsyncAPI). It's mostly been abandoned now, and is JavaScript not TypeScript.

• Stoplight Studio uses Spectral to validate and lint OpenAPI documents.
• Spectral GitHub Action, lints documents in your repo, built by Vincenzo Chianese.
• VS Code Spectral, all the power of Spectral without leaving VS Code.

If you're using Spectral for an interesting use case, contact us for a case study. We'll add it to a list here. Spread the goodness 🎉

If you are interested in contributing to Spectral, check out CONTRIBUTING.md.

• Mike Ralphson for kicking off the Spectral CLI and his work on Speccy
• Jamund Ferguson for JUnit formatter
• Sindre Sorhus for Stylish formatter
• Ava Thorn for the Pretty formatter
• Julian Laval for HTML formatter
• @nulltoken for a whole bunch of amazing features

Spectral is 100% free and open-source, under Apache License 2.0.

If you would like to thank us for creating Spectral, we ask that you buy the world a tree.