---
title: Hound Supports Swift
teaser: Announcing Swift support for Hound.
tags: hound,news,open source,ios
author: Jake Craige
published_on: 2016-03-07
---

Until now, we haven't been able to use [Hound] on an iOS project. In order to
[lint] Objective-C or Swift code, we needed to be able to run the linters -- the
executables that validate the code -- on a Mac server. However, historically
Hound has been deployed on Heroku, which only has GNU/Linux servers.

Last year, Hound's linters were made to run on a service-oriented architecture.
Because of this change, we could run a Mac [in the cloud] which made
implementing support for Objective-C or Swift possible. We chose to rent a Mac
mini from [MacStadium] because it provided the least friction to get one up and
running. Because of our excitement about Swift, we decided to give implementing
a service for it a shot.

The only problem was that we still needed a linter.

Lo and behold, in May 2015, [Realm] released [SwiftLint] which does just that.
[Some discussion and a bit of work later][add-swift-support], Hound supports
Swift!

## Enabling Swift in Hound

You can enable Hound for your Swift project by editing the `.hound.yml` in your
repo. If you want to provide a [custom configuration for SwiftLint][swiftlint
config], you will need to add the `config_file` key like in the example below.

```yaml
swift:
  enabled: true
  config_file: .swiftlint.yml
```

Like the rest of Hound, [hound-swift is open-source][hound-swift]!

We think Hound is the best way to add style-checking to your workflow. Since
it’s free for open source projects, it couldn’t be easier to [get started].

[Hound]: https://houndci.com
[lint]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lint_(software)
[add-swift-support]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/hound/pull/896
[hound-swift]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/hound-swift
[Realm]: https://realm.io/
[SwiftLint]: https://github.com/realm/SwiftLint
[in the cloud]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ntPxdWAWq8
[swiftlint config]: https://github.com/realm/SwiftLint#configuration
[get started]: https://houndci.com
[MacStadium]: https://macstadium.com/