Better Code Quality with Python, PyCharm & Pylint

Regev Golan
2 min readMay 2, 2017

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Have less bugs and better code style in Python with Pylint static code analysis- This is how to do that (With PyCharm IDE):

Install pylint: pip install pylint

Use pylint as an external tool- unfortunately PyCharm doesn’t support changing its python linter:

Go to Pycharm > Preferences > Tools > External Tools > Add (“+” sign) > Fill in the details of pylint:

PyCharm configuration for pylint as an external tool

Pay attention I am not calling the pylint program, but a script I have. This script is in order to have one centralized place that holds the pylint run configuration, able to run on a single file or on a complete dir tree and finally it knows to work inside your python virtualenv (to be able to validate imports):

run_pylint_validation.sh:

#!/bin/bash# No files argument will run on all dir tree
FILES=${1:-"*.py"}
# Should get path from inside the virtualenv
PYLINT_PATH=${2:-"pylint"}
# Disable common bugs with pylint 1.6.4
find
. -type f -name "$FILES" | xargs $PYLINT_PATH --reports=n --disable=C0111,E0401,W0621,E1129,E0202 --rcfile=~/.pylintrc

One final very useful thing to be able to shoot up the pylint validation on the file currently active on PyCharm is to link it to a keystroke:

That’s it! Now you can mark your code on the editor > right click > tools > pylint. This will show you a report of the errors.

Happy coding :)

Regev Golan

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