---
title: Introducing Hound
teaser: |
  Introducing Hound, a hosted service that keeps your codebase clean
  by commenting on style guide violations or other linting issues
  in your GitHub pull requests.
tags: news,web,hound,ruby,good code,open source
author: Scott Albertson
published_on: 2014-04-09
---

We're pleased to announce [Hound], a hosted service that comments on Ruby
style guide violations in your GitHub pull requests.

[Hound]: https://houndci.com

Hound is currently free and available for public and private GitHub projects.
We intend to charge in the near future to ensure Hound is sustainable, but
public projects will continue to be free. [Hound is also open source][open source].

[open source]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/hound

![Hound example](https://images.thoughtbot.com/hound/hound-example-1.png)

## Why code style matters

At thoughtbot, we write code that follows our [open source style guide].

A consistent code style emphasizes care and team communication. It encourages
other developers working in the code to keep the campground clean. It lowers the
cognitive overhead for a developer reading code and lets them focus on
higher-level concerns, such as the domain and the logic. It also avoids
unnecessary debate during code reviews.

[open source style guide]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/guides/tree/master/style

## What we did before Hound

Historically, if we saw a style guide violation when we [reviewed our teammates'
code][review], we would comment on the line in the GitHub pull
request.

[review]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/guides/tree/master/code-review

That worked relatively well, but had some problems.

It was socially awkward. We tended to feel sheepish offering feedback such as:

> 80 character limit

Or:

> Single quotes unless interpolating

It can be tedious to make many of those comments, especially for new developers
on a project.

It can cause reviewers to focus on low-level style concerns instead of the
primary code change.

All of those reasons can add up to not wanting to comment on every style
guide violation, which can let them slip through, which erodes at the benefits
of style consistency.

## How Hound helps

Given those problems, a program is better than a human for reviewing code style.
Hound handles checking for style violations so we humans don't have to.

Hound reviews your Ruby code when a pull request is opened or updated. If Hound
finds any style violations in the modified code it will comment on the
appropriate line.

![Hound example](https://images.thoughtbot.com/hound/hound-example-2.png)

Thanks, Hound!

## Open source

We're also very pleased to experiment with a model of open sourcing a hosted
service from the beginning. There are so many good reasons to do this in
general, and for Hound specifically:

* It provides transparency, as users are able to understand exactly how Hound
  works.
* It creates an ecosystem where third parties may extract libraries from Hound.
* Third parties may submit pull requests to fix their own bugs, increasing the
  number of people who can help support Hound for all its users.
* It places the focus value not on our super-secret-source-code but on our
  handling of the hosting, billing, and maintenance of that source code.
* It provides security through the "many eyes" approach, which we believe is
  better than security through obscurity.

We believe Hound can be financially successful while being open source.

## Ready and waiting for you

Hound has been used on over 300 GitHub projects. We've been using it internally
for some time. It only takes a minute to start using it on your project.

[Try Hound today][Hound].