Count lines of code with PowerShell

Anatoly Mironov

Today I got a question:

How many lines of code are there in our SharePoint solution?

After a little search, I found that PowerShell is really a nice tool to count lines of code:

I wanted to count lines for different types of code:

  1. Code Behind written in C#, the files have .cs file extension
  2. JavaScript code (except jQuery, angular or knockout frameworks)
  3. PowerShell files (.ps1 and psm1)
  4. Xml files (all the SharePoint .xml files)

Here is the powershell code that counts lines of code:

# go to the solution folder
cd <solution directory>
#count lines in .cs files
ls -include *.cs -recurse | select-string . | measure | select count
#count lines in our .js files
ls -include *.js -recurse `
  -exclude *min.js, jquery*, _*, jsrender*,
CamlBuilder*, knockout* `
  | select-string . `
  | measure `
  | select Count
#count lines in our powershell scripts
ls -include *.xml -recurse | select-string . | measure | select count
#count lines in our powershell scripts
ls -include *.ps1, *.psm1 -recurse | select-string . | measure | select count

Just a curious fact, I can’t tell you how many lines of code we have in our solution, but I can reveal the proportions. If I used the flexible box model in css3, it would look like this: lines of code

There are as many lines of code written in javascript as it is in C#. The main reason that for the big js code base are the SharePoint hosted apps. The PowerShell scripts are as big the javascript code base. Xml files are 4 times bigger than C# code, and it is even bigger than the sum of all lines of code written in C#, JavaScript and PowerShell. It isn’t strange that xml is dominating, almost everything in SharePoint is defined in xml. Fortunately, there are less cases where you have to write raw xml in Visual Studio 2012/2013 and SharePoint 2013. How does it look in your project? What language is dominating in your SharePoint project?