Delphi-RAG-Lint

drag-lint help

Installation

Since: 0.21.0-alpha

Getting the CLI, the IDE plugin, or the LSP running.

Read this to get drag-lint running: the command-line engine, the RAD Studio plugin and the language server for other editors install independently, and most people want the first two. It lists what to unzip and which files must stay together.

Details

One-step alternative: Setup installer installs all of it -- engine, charts, Graphviz, plugin, YADF -- with one exe (experimental).

drag-lint has three faces, and they install independently. Most people want the first two.

  1. CLI -- the engine. Everything else spawns it.
  2. RAD Studio plugin -- the drag-lint menu, hover, dockable panels.
  3. Language server -- for VS Code, Neovim, Helix, Zed.

1. CLI

  1. Download drag-lint-vX.Y.Z-win64.zip from Releases. Win64 is the supported target; a Win32 build exists but is a frozen fallback.

  2. Unzip the whole folder and keep every file together:

    drag-lint.exe                 the tool
tree-sitter-delphi13.dll      } parser DLLs -- MUST sit next to the exe
tree-sitter-dfm.dll           }
tree-sitter.dll               }
rules\                        external lint rules (*.scm + *.json)
  builtin-symbols.txt

  3. Optionally add the folder to PATH, or call the exe by full path.

Two things that break a fresh install

rules\ must sit beside the exe. The .scm rules load from <exe-dir>\rules. Move the exe without the folder and the external rules silently stop loading -- the built-in checks still run, so you get fewer findings rather than an error. Use --rules-dir <path> if you must separate them.

The tree-sitter DLLs must be the matching bitness. A Win64 exe that finds Win32 parser DLLs on PATH dies at process start with 0xC000007B (STATUS_INVALID_IMAGE_FORMAT). That is a bitness mismatch, not a missing DLL (0xC0000135), which is why it does not look like a staging problem.

Verify

.\drag-lint.exe --version
.\drag-lint.exe rules            # the full, always-current rule catalogue

2. Build your first index

The linter works on a bare .pas file, but navigation, callers, impact analysis and documentation all need an index.

.\drag-lint.exe index C:\path\to\project --db myapp.sqlite
.\drag-lint.exe query --name TMyClass --db myapp.sqlite

For real use, prefer the manifest so commands find databases themselves -- see Maintenance.

3. RAD Studio plugin

The plugin is a design-time package, dclDragLintWizard.bpl. It adds a top-level drag-lint menu to the IDE menu bar (falling back to Tools if the main menu is unavailable) and two dockable windows under View > Tool Windows.

Install

  1. Close all RAD Studio instances. A design-time BPL cannot be replaced while the IDE holds it.
  2. Copy the BPL and the CLI (with its DLLs and rules\) to a folder of your choice.
  3. In RAD Studio: Component > Install Packages > Add..., select dclDragLintWizard.bpl.
  4. Restart the IDE. A drag-lint item appears in the menu bar.

It needs the CLI

The plugin does not contain the engine -- it spawns drag-lint.exe. If the menu items fail, check that the exe is reachable and still has rules\ beside it. drag-lint > Open Plugin Log shows what the plugin actually invoked.

Bitness

The IDE is 32-bit, but the plugin spawns the Win64 CLI by default: the 64-bit engine handles large indexes that the 32-bit one cannot (it runs out of address space on multi-gigabyte databases). The BPL is the only 32-bit artifact.

4. Editors (LSP)

drag-lint ships a stdio language server:

drag-lint lsp

It provides hover, go-to-definition, find-references, workspace symbols, completion and signature help from the index -- across every project in the manifest at once. Find-references and workspace-symbols are not duplicated by DelphiLSP, which does not implement them.

  • VS Code -- extension included at editors\vscode\drag-lint\.
  • Neovim / Helix / anything else -- point the client at drag-lint lsp over stdio.
  • Zed -- syntax highlighting works today via the tree-sitter grammars; registering the language server needs a small Rust/WASM extension that is specified but not built.

Full settings and the Rust extension spec: docs/EDITORS.md in the repository.

Suppressing a finding

A line comment on the offending line:

Q.SQL.Text := 'SELECT * FROM t WHERE id=' + Id;  // drag-lint:ignore sql-injection-concat
X := X;                                          // drag-lint:ignore   <- all rules

For a finding a human has reviewed and accepted, prefer the reviewed marker, which is self-invalidating -- it carries a hash of the line's code tokens and re-reports itself if the code changes:

except // dl:ok bare-except@7f3a -- rethrown by the caller

Reindentation and case changes do not invalidate it; a real edit does.

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