# API endpoint for linting config files

**URL:** <https://discuss.circleci.com/t/api-endpoint-for-linting-config-files/33563>\
**Category:** API\
**Created:** [November 30, 2019, 1:37pm UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/api-endpoint-for-linting-config-files/33563 "2019-11-30T13:37:36Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![pat-s](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/circleci/user_avatar/discuss.circleci.com/pat-s/32/23379_2.png) [@pat-s](https://discuss.circleci.com/u/pat-s)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2019, 1:37pm UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/api-endpoint-for-linting-config-files/33563/1 "2019-11-30T13:37:36Z")

</div>

Would be great to have an API way to lint config files, similar as Travis CI does it: [https://docs.travis-ci.com/api#linting](https://docs.travis-ci.com/api#linting)

Are there any plans for this? I assume you have an internal linter for the config files. Maybe this one could be exposed via the API…

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![ndintenfass](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/circleci/user_avatar/discuss.circleci.com/ndintenfass/32/156_2.png) [@ndintenfass](https://discuss.circleci.com/u/ndintenfass)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2019, 5:13pm UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/api-endpoint-for-linting-config-files/33563/2 "2019-11-30T17:13:50Z")

</div>

You can get config validation in our CLI using `circleci config validate` - does that give you what you need?

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![pat-s](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/circleci/user_avatar/discuss.circleci.com/pat-s/32/23379_2.png) [@pat-s](https://discuss.circleci.com/u/pat-s)\
**Post date:** [November 30, 2019, 5:29pm UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/api-endpoint-for-linting-config-files/33563/3 "2019-11-30T17:29:17Z")

</div>

Thanks @ndintenfass.  
I am aware of this method. However, I wrote an API client package and for this I would need an explicit api endpoint to support linting 🙂

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![haikusw](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/circleci/user_avatar/discuss.circleci.com/haikusw/32/23204_2.png) [@haikusw](https://discuss.circleci.com/u/haikusw)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2019, 5:40am UTC](https://discuss.circleci.com/t/api-endpoint-for-linting-config-files/33563/4 "2019-12-05T05:40:34Z")

</div>

I filed a bug 3 months ago about the CLI validate tool not using the same validation rules/grammar as the actual parser on the CI servers. Useless as a validator as a result; passes things that don’t work on the server.

> <https://github.com/CircleCI-Public/circleci-cli/issues/326>
>
> Description
> The circleci command line tool config verify command doesn't seem to do a very thorough job or actually validate against the...

I’m not the only one to find issues with it: [https://ideas.circleci.com/ideas/CCI-I-1131](https://ideas.circleci.com/ideas/CCI-I-1131)

and a number of others in the Bug Reports section on [discuss.circleci.com](http://discuss.circleci.com) (many closed due to lack of comments, not because they were actually fixed).