Flake8

Flake8 is a wrapper around these tools:

• PyFlakes
• pep8
• Ned Batchelder's McCabe script

Flake8 runs all the tools by launching the single flake8 script. It displays the warnings in a per-file, merged output.

It also adds a few features:

• files that contain this line are skipped:

  # flake8: noqa
  

• lines that contain a # noqa comment at the end will not issue warnings.

• a Git and a Mercurial hook.

• a McCabe complexity checker.

• extendable through flake8.extension entry points.

QuickStart

pip install flake8

To run flake8 just invoke it against any directory or Python module:

$ flake8 coolproject
coolproject/mod.py:97:1: F401 'shutil' imported but unused
coolproject/mod.py:625:17: E225 missing whitespace around operato
coolproject/mod.py:729:1: F811 redefinition of function 'readlines' from line 723
coolproject/mod.py:1028:1: F841 local variable 'errors' is assigned to but never used

The outputs of PyFlakes and pep8 (and the optional plugins) are merged and returned.

flake8 offers an extra option: --max-complexity, which will emit a warning if the McCabe complexity of a function is higher than the value. By default it's deactivated:

$ flake8 --max-complexity 12 coolproject
coolproject/mod.py:97:1: F401 'shutil' imported but unused
coolproject/mod.py:625:17: E225 missing whitespace around operator
coolproject/mod.py:729:1: F811 redefinition of unused 'readlines' from line 723
coolproject/mod.py:939:1: C901 'Checker.check_all' is too complex (12)
coolproject/mod.py:1028:1: F841 local variable 'errors' is assigned to but never used
coolproject/mod.py:1204:1: C901 'selftest' is too complex (14)

This feature is quite useful to detect over-complex code. According to McCabe, anything that goes beyond 10 is too complex. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclomatic_complexity.

Questions or Feedback

If you have questions you'd like to ask the developers, or feedback you'd like to provide, feel free to use the mailing list: code-quality@python.org We would love to hear from you. Additionally, if you have a feature you'd like to suggest, the mailing list would be the best place for it.

Links

• flake8 documentation
• pep8 documentation