If you are tired of maintaining your coding style, I have good news for you. Fortunately, there are developer tools that can automate and streamline mundane development tasks. In this blog, I'll show you how I integrated 2 static code analysis tools and a package manager for pre-commit hooks into Silke, my work-in-progress static site generator.
Black: The uncompromising Python code formatter
Black can help you automatically format your Python code that follows (most of) the style conventions in PEP 8. You can install this tool with Pip and Python 3.6.2+:
$ pip install black
After installation, Black should work without configuring anything else:
$ black .
Once Black is executed, it will tell you which files have been reformatted. When I ran it on Silkie, Black produced the following output:
reformatted silkie/silkie.py
All done! ✨ 🍰 ✨
1 file reformatted.
After testing Silkie, I was pleasantly amazed that Black didn't break my code. If you are still worried that Black may break your program by alternating your code, you can include the --diff
flag when running it. That should allow Black to only suggest their changes.
VSCode Integration
If you use Visual Studio Code as your code editor, you can easily integrate Black into it. First, you need to create a settings.json
file under .vscode
folder if you haven't had it. Then, add these 2 lines to enable Black to reformat your Python code when you save your files:
{
"python.formatting.provider": "black",
"editor.formatOnSave": true,
}
Flake8: Python 3-in-one linter
A code linter should help developers identify potential errors and coding style violations in your code; and I think Flake8 can accomplish that. Flake8 combines PyFlakes
, pycodestyle
, and Ned Batchelder's McCabe script
to enhance our Python code quality.
Setting it up is as easy as a one-line command:
pip install flake8
Once it's installed, you can run it on your project right away. However, you can save your time later by specifying which files and/or directories Flake8 should exclude from its scan. In order to do that:
- Create a
tox.ini
file in your root directory. - Specify the excluded files/folders separated by commas. Take my project as an example:
[flake8]
exclude =
# Version control directory
.git,
# GitHub configuration directory
.github
# Python compiled bytecode
__pycache__,
# Python third-party libraries & packages
lib,
# Python scripts & binary files
bin,
# Build directory
dist,
Then, I ran Flake8 on my project:
$ flake8 .
By default, Flake8's style rules may have some conflicts with Black's. For instance, although Black already formatted my code, Flake8 would still bug me for having too many characters per line:
./silkie/silkie.py:37:80: E501 line too long (83 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:43:80: E501 line too long (84 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:52:80: E501 line too long (80 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:76:80: E501 line too long (86 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:80:80: E501 line too long (80 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:104:80: E501 line too long (80 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:149:80: E501 line too long (80 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:157:80: E501 line too long (80 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:159:80: E501 line too long (83 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:199:80: E501 line too long (85 > 79 characters)
./silkie/silkie.py:210:80: E501 line too long (88 > 79 characters)
Moreover, Flake8 found a false positive error:
./silkie/silkie.py:159:56: E203 whitespace before ':'
Flake8 actually complained about the whitespace before a list slice:
To resolve those issues, I configured Flake8 in tox.ini
file, located in the root directory, to ignore those false positive stylistic errors:
[flake8]
max-line-length = 88
ignore =
# False positive whitespace before ':' on list slice.
# See https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/373 for details
E203
VSCode Integration
Flake8 can integrated into Visual Studio Code by adding these lines to settings.json
file under .vscode
folder:
{
"python.linting.flake8Enabled": true,
"python.linting.enabled": true,
"python.linting.flake8Args": ["--max-line-length=88"],
...
}
Pre-commit: Multi-language pre-commit hooks manager
If you don't want to manually run Black and Flake8 before committing your changes, you can automate it with pre-commit
.
To install pre-commit
, run this command:
$ pip install pre-commit
Once it's installed, you can set up pre-commit hooks by specifying them in the .pre-commit-config.yaml
file. For example, this is how I added Black and Flake8 as pre-commit Git hook scripts to my project:
repos:
- repo: https://github.com/psf/black
rev: 21.10b0
hooks:
- id: black
- repo: https://github.com/pycqa/flake8
rev: 4.0.1
hooks:
- id: flake8
To run these tools before every git commit
commands, you need to install the scripts with this command:
$ pre-commit install
After installation, Black and Flake8 should be executed before any modification is committed.
Conclusion
I initially thought integrating these tools into my project would take a lot of time, but it was actually really quick and straightforward. Thanks to the development teams behind Black & Flake8, my life as a developer has been much easier. I can't wait to try out other awesome tools!
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