CLI

Use the prettier command to run Prettier from the command line.

prettier [options] [file/dir/glob ...]

To run your locally installed version of Prettier, prefix the command with npx or yarn (if you use Yarn), i.e. npx prettier --help, or yarn prettier --help.

To format a file in-place, use --write. (Note: This overwrites your files!)

In practice, this may look something like:

prettier . --write

This command formats all files supported by Prettier in the current directory and its subdirectories.

It’s recommended to always make sure that prettier --write . only formats what you want in your project. Use a .prettierignore file to ignore things that should not be formatted.

A more complicated example:

prettier docs package.json "{app,__{tests,mocks}__}/**/*.js" --write --single-quote --trailing-comma all

Don’t forget the quotes around the globs! The quotes make sure that Prettier CLI expands the globs rather than your shell, which is important for cross-platform usage.

It’s better to use a configuration file for formatting options like --single-quote and --trailing-comma instead of passing them as CLI flags. This way the Prettier CLI, editor integrations, and other tooling can all know what options you use.

File patterns

Given a list of paths/patterns, the Prettier CLI first treats every entry in it as a literal path.

• If the path points to an existing file, Prettier CLI proceeds with that file and doesn’t resolve the path as a glob pattern.

• If the path points to an existing directory, Prettier CLI recursively finds supported files in that directory. This resolution process is based on file extensions and well-known file names that Prettier and its plugins associate with supported languages.

• Otherwise, the entry is resolved as a glob pattern using the glob syntax from the fast-glob module.

Prettier CLI will ignore files located in node_modules directory. To opt out from this behavior, use --with-node-modules flag.

Prettier CLI will not follow symbolic links when expanding arguments.

To escape special characters in globs, one of the two escaping syntaxes can be used: prettier "\[my-dir]/*.js" or prettier "[[]my-dir]/*.js". Both match all JS files in a directory named [my-dir], however the latter syntax is preferable as the former doesn’t work on Windows, where backslashes are treated as path separators.

--check

When you want to check if your files are formatted, you can run Prettier with the --check flag (or -c). This will output a human-friendly message and a list of unformatted files, if any.

prettier . --check

Console output if all files are formatted:

Checking formatting...
All matched files use Prettier code style!

Console output if some of the files require re-formatting:

Checking formatting...
[warn] src/fileA.js
[warn] src/fileB.js
[warn] Code style issues found in 2 files. Run Prettier to fix.

The command will return exit code 1 in the second case, which is helpful inside the CI pipelines. Human-friendly status messages help project contributors react on possible problems. To minimise the number of times prettier --check finds unformatted files, you may be interested in configuring a pre-commit hook in your repo. Applying this practice will minimise the number of times the CI fails because of code formatting problems.

If you need to pipe the list of unformatted files to another command, you can use --list-different flag instead of --check.

Exit codes

Code	Information
0	Everything formatted properly
1	Something wasn’t formatted properly
2	Something’s wrong with Prettier

--debug-check

If you're worried that Prettier will change the correctness of your code, add --debug-check to the command. This will cause Prettier to print an error message if it detects that code correctness might have changed. Note that --write cannot be used with --debug-check.

--find-config-path and --config

If you are repeatedly formatting individual files with prettier, you will incur a small performance cost when Prettier attempts to look up a configuration file. In order to skip this, you may ask Prettier to find the config file once, and re-use it later on.

$ prettier --find-config-path path/to/file.js
path/to/.prettierrc

This will provide you with a path to the configuration file, which you can pass to --config:

prettier path/to/file.js --write --config path/to/.prettierrc

You can also use --config if your configuration file lives somewhere where Prettier cannot find it, such as a config/ directory.

If you don’t have a configuration file, or want to ignore it if it does exist, you can pass --no-config instead.

--ignore-path

Path to a file containing patterns that describe files to ignore. By default, Prettier looks for ./.prettierignore.
Multiple values are accepted.

--list-different

Another useful flag is --list-different (or -l) which prints the filenames of files that are different from Prettier formatting. If there are differences the script errors out, which is useful in a CI scenario.

prettier . --single-quote --list-different

You can also use --check flag, which works the same way as --list-different, but also prints a human-friendly summary message to stdout.

--no-config

Do not look for a configuration file. The default settings will be used.

--config-precedence

Defines how config file should be evaluated in combination of CLI options.

cli-override (default)

CLI options take precedence over config file

file-override

Config file take precedence over CLI options

prefer-file

If a config file is found will evaluate it and ignore other CLI options. If no config file is found, CLI options will evaluate as normal.

This option adds support to editor integrations where users define their default configuration but want to respect project specific configuration.

--no-editorconfig

Don’t take .editorconfig into account when parsing configuration. See the prettier.resolveConfig docs for details.

--with-node-modules

Prettier CLI will ignore files located in node_modules directory. To opt out from this behavior, use --with-node-modules flag.

--write

This rewrites all processed files in place. This is comparable to the eslint --fix workflow. You can also use -w alias.

--log-level

Change the level of logging for the CLI. Valid options are:

• error
• warn
• log (default)
• debug
• silent

--stdin-filepath

A path to the file that the Prettier CLI will treat like stdin. For example:

abc.css

.name {
  display: none;
}

shell

$ cat abc.css | prettier --stdin-filepath abc.css
.name {
  display: none;
}

--ignore-unknown

With --ignore-unknown (or -u), prettier will ignore unknown files matched by patterns.

prettier "**/*" --write --ignore-unknown

--no-error-on-unmatched-pattern

Prevent errors when pattern is unmatched.

--cache

If this option is enabled, the following values are used as cache keys and the file is formatted only if one of them is changed.

• Prettier version
• Options
• Node.js version
• (if --cache-strategy is metadata) file metadata, such as timestamps
• (if --cache-strategy is content) content of the file

prettier . --write --cache

Running Prettier without --cache will delete the cache.

Also, since the cache file is stored in ./node_modules/.cache/prettier/.prettier-cache, so you can use rm ./node_modules/.cache/prettier/.prettier-cache to remove it manually.

Plugins version and implementation are not used as cache keys. We recommend that you delete the cache when updating plugins.

--cache-location

Path to the cache file location used by --cache flag. If you don't explicit --cache-location, Prettier saves cache file at ./node_modules/.cache/prettier/.prettier-cache.

If a file path is passed, that file is used as the cache file.

prettier . --write --cache --cache-location=path/to/cache-file

--cache-strategy

Strategy for the cache to use for detecting changed files. Can be either metadata or content.

In general, metadata is faster. However, content is useful for updating the timestamp without changing the file content. This can happen, for example, during git operations such as git clone, because it does not track file modification times.

If no strategy is specified, content will be used.

prettier . --write --cache --cache-strategy metadata