ESLint was created by Nicholas C. Zakas in June 2013. After working at Yahoo and dealing with JSLint and JSHint’s limitations, Zakas built ESLint to be fully pluggable. The project is maintained by a dedicated team of open-source contributors and funded through the Open Source Collective.
What set ESLint apart from the beginning was its rule-based architecture. Every single rule is a plugin, and developers can create their own custom rules. You can configure each rule to be off, a warning, or an error. The –fix flag automatically corrects many issues, saving hours of manual code formatting.
ESLint parses JavaScript into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) and runs rules against that tree. This approach is more reliable than regex-based linting and can catch subtle bugs. It supports ECMAScript 2015+ syntax, JSX, TypeScript (via @typescript-eslint), and other flavors through custom parsers.
In 2024, ESLint introduced the flat config system, a major overhaul that simplified configuration by replacing the cascading .eslintrc files with a single eslint.config.js file. Shareable configs like eslint-config-airbnb have become industry standards — the Airbnb style guide alone has over 145,000 GitHub stars.
ESLint gets downloaded over 40 million times per week on npm. It’s used by virtually every serious JavaScript project and integrated into every major code editor. The project has over 24,000 GitHub stars.
