Flake8 is a Python library that wraps PyFlakes, pycodestyle and Ned Batchelder’s McCabe script. It is a great toolkit for checking your code base against coding style (PEP8), programming errors (like “library imported but unused” and “Undefined name”) and to check cyclomatic complexity.

If you are not familiar with the term cyclomatic complexity, it is a software metric created by Thomas J. McCabe to measure the number of independent paths through the source code. Generally speaking, the higher number of ifs inside a function, the higher number of paths it will have, thus a higher cyclomatic complexity. Of course there are other control flow operations that impact the calculus of the cyclomatic complexity. It is also referred as McCabe complexity.

Speaking about coding style, I also like to follow the Django Coding Style on the Django projects I develop. This style standard is only enforced when writing code for inclusion in Django.

Installation

Easiest way to get started is installing it using pip:

pip install flake8

Usage

Inside the Django project dir, run the command:

flake8

Or you can pass the path to a file/dir:

flake8 bootcamp/feeds/

The output will be something like that:

./bootcamp/settings.py:96:80: E501 line too long (91 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/settings.py:99:80: E501 line too long (81 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/settings.py:102:80: E501 line too long (82 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/settings.py:105:80: E501 line too long (83 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/settings.py:156:80: E501 line too long (94 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/settings.py:165:5: F403 'from local_settings import *' used; unable to detect undefined names
./bootcamp/urls.py:5:1: F401 'django.contrib.auth.views as auth_views' imported but unused
./bootcamp/urls.py:6:1: F401 'django.core.urlresolvers.reverse' imported but unused
./bootcamp/urls.py:16:80: E501 line too long (88 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/urls.py:17:80: E501 line too long (84 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/urls.py:18:80: E501 line too long (87 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/urls.py:22:80: E501 line too long (80 > 79 characters)
./bootcamp/members/forms.py:5:1: F401 'django.forms.extras.SelectDateWidget' imported but unused
...

The output is formatted as:

file path : line number : column number : error code : short description

Error code prefix:

• E***/W***: pep8 errors and warnings
• F***: PyFlakes codes (see below)
• C9**: McCabe complexity plugin mccabe
• N8**: Naming Conventions plugin pep8-naming

You can see the full list of error codes in the links below:

• PEP8 error codes.
• PyFlakes error codes.
• PEP8 Naming error codes.

Configuring

You can pass some project-based configuration parameters using a setup.cfg file. If you already have one, just edit it. If that is not the case, create a file named setup.cfg in the project root.

[flake8]
exclude = .git,*migrations*
max-line-length = 119

Those are the basic configurations I use in every project. The exclude parameter is used to ignore file/dirs. The default line-length is 79. I find it too small and sometimes makes the code look worse. So, following the Django code style guidelines, I stick with 119.

See the full list of options.

In-Line Ignoring Errors

Just add # noqa in the end of the line.

class ProfilesConfig(AppConfig):
    name = 'cmdbox.profiles'
    verbose_name = _('profiles')

    def ready(self):
        import cmdbox.profiles.signals.handlers  # noqa

Or you can pass the specific error code you want to ignore:

import cmdbox.profiles.signals.handlers  # noqa: F401

Running flake8 on Travis CI

The example below is a .travis.yml file from a project of mine. You can run flake8 checks very easily just by adding the commands inside the script list.

.travis.yml

language: python
python:
  - "2.7"
install: "pip install -r requirements.txt"
before_script:
  - cp .env.example .env
  - python manage.py migrate
script:
  - flake8 cmdbox
  - coverage run manage.py test --settings=cmdbox.tests_settings
after_success:
  - coveralls

That’s it! As you can see, it is really easy to start making your Django project PEP8 complaint with flake8.