Useful tools

Part of the previous conventions and practices can be controlled and worked out with the following tools:

• Pylint: This is a very flexible source code analyzer

• pep8 and flake8: These are a small code style checker, and a wrapper that adds to it some more useful features, like static analysis and complexity measurement

Pylint

Besides some quality assurance metrics, Pylint allows you to check whether a given source code is following a naming convention. Its default settings correspond to PEP 8, and a Pylint script provides a shell report output.

To install Pylint, you can use pip:

$ pip install pylint

After this step, the command is available and can be run against a module, or several modules, using wildcards. Let's try it on Buildout's bootstrap.py script:

$ wget -O bootstrap.py https://bootstrap.pypa.io/bootstrap-buildout.py -q
$ pylint bootstrap.py
No config file found, using default configuration
************* Module bootstrap
C: 76, 0: Unnecessary parens after 'print' keyword...