Adding a Spell Checker to a Jekyll Blog

I found it annoyingly non-trivial to add a spell checker to this blog.

For now, I settled on GitHub Spellcheck Action that uses PySpelling on files changed in the commit or pull request as described in this blog post.

name: Check Spelling
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  check:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: tj-actions/changed-files@v45
        id: changed_files
        with:
          files: |
            **/**.md
            **/**.markdown
      - name: Check Spelling
        uses: rojopolis/spellcheck-github-actions@0.45.0
        with:
          task_name: Markdown
          config_path: .pyspelling.yml
          source_files: ${{ steps.changed_files.outputs.all_changed_files }}

To run PySpelling locally ensure you have a working version of Python, install PySpelling with pip install pyspelling, and aspell with brew install aspell on a Mac. In my configuration I also use pymdownx from pymdown-extensions which is installed with pip install pymdown-extensions.

You need a .pyspelling.yml and you can run it as follows.

pyspelling --config .pyspelling.yml

This is a Jekyll blog in which we want to ignore code, wrapped between Jekyll magic commands for syntax highlighting. This can be accomplished with a PySpelling pipeline in the above-mentioned configuration file.

pipeline:
  - pyspelling.filters.context:
      context_visible_first: true
      delimiters:
        # ignore jekyll multiline magic highlights {% ... %}
        - open: '(?s)^\{\% highlight .* \%\}$'
          close: '^\{\% endhighlight \%\}$'
        # ignore the rest of jekyll magic commands
        - open: '{%'
          close: '%}'

Finally, we can collect the initial set of words to potentially exclude from existing posts into .pyspelling.words.

pyspelling --config .pyspelling.yml | \
  sed -n '/^Misspelled words:$/,/^-*$/!p' | \
  grep -v "^---\+$" | \
  grep -v "^$" | \
  sort | \
  uniq > .pyspelling.words

The file helped me spot a few spelling mistakes, now fixed. See code.dblock.org#134 for the full change.

Update: I eventually switched to using regular backticks for code when adding a style checker in #136, so the above delimiters rule changed as follows.

- pyspelling.filters.context:
    context_visible_first: true
    escapes: \\[\\`~]
    delimiters:
      - open: "(?s)^(?P<open> *`{3,})([a-z+]*)$"
        close: "^(?P=open)$"
      - open: "(?P<open>`+)"
        close: "(?P=open)"
      - open: '{%'
        close: '%}'

Daniel Doubrovkine

Adding a Spell Checker to a Jekyll Blog blog

Adding a Spell Checker to a Jekyll Blog