Autoformat C# code from command line

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0700

We all need a tool to format code automatically according to project’s convention. Using an IDE like Visual Studio, Xamarin or MonoDevelop, we can format code easily. However, it’s not always convenient to fireup the IDE just for formatting some code, and also having a tool on the command line makes it easier to integrate with other workflows. Therefore, it’s great if we have some tool which runs on the command line to auto format our code.

Requirements

Customizable format options
Format whole directory recursively

The second requirement is relatively easy to implement if we have a tool to format a single file on the commandline because we can just use find with some filter to iteratively apply the tool to a bunch of files.

Solution 1: Astyle

Artistic Style is a source code indenter, formatter, and beautifier for the C, C++, C++/CLI, Objective‑C, C# and Java programming languages. We can download and install Astyle rather quickly without any problems on most platforms.

Installation We will use a simple script below to help us install AStyle on Mac OSX. Installation on other platforms can be done in a similar manner

Usage After we have astyle available on the command line, applying it for our project is a matter of wrapping everything in a single Make command like so

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# Supposed our Code is in the Code folder
format:
	find Code -iname "*.cs" -not -path "Code/excludedpath/*" | xargs -n 1 -I {} bash -c "astyle --options=.astylerc \"{}\""

Remember to create a file called .astylerc and put whatever format options you want to customize for your project there.

Solution 2: NRefactory

NRefactory is the C# analysis library used in the SharpDevelop and MonoDevelop IDEs. We can write a command line client with our customized parameters and format options, which uses NRefactory internally to format code.

TODO: Write a cli using docopt

C# on Huy Minh Ha

Autoformat C# code from command line

Solution 1: Astyle

Solution 2: NRefactory