pbiplint

About pbiplint

pbiplint is a free, open-source best-practice linter for Power BI projects. Paste TMDL or drop a .SemanticModel folder on the home page, or run npx pbiplint <path> on your own machine, and get a ranked list of findings with a page for every rule that says what it checks, why it matters, and how to fix it.

What it checks

Version 1 covers the semantic model: every rule from the Microsoft Best Practice Analyzer ruleset, ported so the results match Tabular Editor on the same model. Five rules need statistics only a live model has; they are listed but not run. Report rules and Power Query rules come next. The rules index has the full list.

Who makes it

pbiplint is made by McKinley Consulting, the makers of The Data Practitioner. It is free software under the GNU Affero General Public License, version 3 or later, and the source is on GitHub. There is no paid tier, and no plan to charge for rules.

How to check that nothing is uploaded

The analysis runs in your browser. There is no server behind this site, no account, and no analytics. You can check that yourself:

  1. Open your browser's developer tools, switch to the Network tab, load this site, and lint a model. After the page's own files load, no request is made: not when you drop a folder, not when you click a button, not when you export a report.
  2. Load the page, then turn on airplane mode or unplug the network. Everything still works, because nothing needed the network.
  3. View the page source. Every page carries a Content-Security-Policy with connect-src 'none': the browser itself refuses to let the page open a connection of any kind.
  4. Read the code. The linter core has a build check that fails if it references a network API, and the site build fails if any page references an external script, style, font, or image.

The command-line tool is the same code with a folder walk in front of it. It reads the files you point it at and writes to your terminal or to a file you name.

What it does not do

pbiplint does not document models, apply fixes, or analyze query performance. For documentation there is PBIP Documenter; for query plans there is DAX Studio. The rules pbiplint ports are the Best Practice Analyzer rules, so a model that is clean here is clean there too.