SpellcheckCI

Making sure you have correct spelling on your blog posts is vital to keep readers attention. Unfortunately, it’s a laborious process and sometimes things fall through the cracks. Being the nerd I am, I decided I needed a shell script to solve this problem.

Thankfully, someone has created an open source markdown based spellcheck module that is Node based - mdspell.

Since I’m using Gatsby, my posts can be found under content/blog/*/index.md - where * is the name of the blog post. The command to run the spell check was then

$ npm i -g node-markdown-spellcheck && mdspell -a -n "content/blog/**/*.md"

This would go through each of my posts and then validate the spelling is correct. When it comes across an incorrect spelling, it notifies me and asks me if I want to correct it, or add it to a local dictionary.

But, because I often blog from my iPad, where I don’t have a terminal, I wanted this feedback to be visible on the CI for the new blog posts. My workflow for creating new posts is create a new git branch, create the file and write the post, push to github and create a new pull request. You can find this exact blog post’s pull request here.

Time to Automate

I’m a big user of GitHub Actions so I went with that to setup this process.

Initially, I went down the road of installing all the node dependencies, then installing mdspell and then running the spellcheck. However, I found that it took over a minute to download all the node modules! It turns out, I could have used npx to use mdspell without having to install the project.

Here is the complete GitHubCI - which, across over 50 blog posts, takes around 10 seconds to run!

# ./.github/workflows/spellcheck.yml
name: Spellcheck

on: [pull_request]

jobs:
  spellcheck:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    strategy:
      matrix:
        node-version: [14.x]

    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Use Node.js ${{ matrix.node-version }}
        uses: actions/setup-node@v1
        with:
          node-version: ${{ matrix.node-version }}
      - run: npm i markdown-spellcheck -g
      - run: mdspell -a -n -r "content/blog/**/*.md"
        name: Spellcheck

I hope this proves useful to you for your own blog. If you don’t have one already, I’d highly recommend creating one!