prettier-plugin-flatbuffers weekly downloads statistics

prettier-plugin-flatbuffers

If you use Prettier, this plugin gives you canonical FlatBuffers schema formatting with no extra commands. It's a thin shim over flatbuffers-format — same output, same guarantees, just Prettier-routed. Install it, add it to your .prettierrc, and .fbs files start formatting alongside everything else your editor already touches.

Install

flatbuffers-format is a regular runtime dependency, so npm will pull it in for you — the third entry above is just for clarity in your package.json.

Activate

.prettierrc:

That's it. Any .fbs file Prettier sees from then on is formatted by this plugin.

Editor integrations (VS Code, Neovim, etc.) pick up the plugin automatically as long as Prettier itself does.

Behavior

The plugin maps Prettier's layout options to flatbuffers-format's FormatOptions:

| Prettier option | Effect |

| tabWidth (default 2) | Forwarded as the engine's indent (count of indent characters per level). | | useTabs (default false)| Forwarded as the engine's useTabs. The engine emits literal tab characters when this is true (since flatbuffers-format ≥ 0.2). Combine with tabWidth: 1 for the usual "one tab per level" setting. | | printWidth (default 80)| Forwarded as the engine's lineWidth. Drives the "does it fit on one line" decision for small enums/unions/single-field bodies and for line-comment wrapping. | | endOfLine | Handled by Prettier itself ("lf", "crlf", "cr", "auto"). The engine always emits \n; Prettier post-processes the output to the requested line ending. |

Other Prettier options (singleQuote, trailingComma, etc.) are ignored — .fbs has no syntactic surface for them.

How it works

Prettier 3 plugins normally define a parse function that builds an AST and a print function that turns it back into a Doc tree. That's the right shape when the formatter is *of* Prettier, not just plugged into it. Here, the canonical form is defined entirely by flatbuffers-format, so we use Prettier's preprocess hook to run format() on the source. The text Prettier's printer receives is already canonical; the printer just returns it verbatim. No AST round-tripping, no risk of drift between the engine and a duplicated Prettier-side implementation.

For everything about the formatting rules themselves (idempotency guarantees, what's preserved, what's normalized, comment handling, the cookbook of before/after examples) see the flatbuffers-format README.

Development setup

Inside the monorepo, the flatbuffers-format dependency is wired to the sibling project via a relative file: install:

That means the sibling must be built first:

When this plugin is published to npm, the file: reference will be swapped for a pinned ^0.1 range against the published flatbuffers-format package.

Releases

Releases are automated via release-please. Land a Conventional Commit on main → a release PR appears → merging it tags and publishes.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.

Description from the npm listing.