Flake8 is a Python linting framework that combines several established source code analysis tools. It brings together Pyflakes for finding programming errors, pycodestyle for checking coding conventions and McCabe complexity analysis for identifying overly complicated functions.
The application presents findings from these analysers through a single command-line interface. Its extensive plugin ecosystem enables developers to add specialised checks for security, documentation, asynchronous programming and other aspects of Python development.
Flake8 remains useful for projects that depend on particular plugins or established checking configurations. Although Ruff implements many checks inspired by Flake8 and its plugins, the two tools are not completely interchangeable. Flake8’s extensibility makes it attractive when custom analysis rules are an important part of a team’s development process.
This is free and open source software.
Key Features
- Combines Pyflakes, pycodestyle and McCabe complexity checking through a unified interface.
- Supports third-party analysis plugins through the flake8.extension entry point.
- Allows custom reporting behaviour through its formatting extension interface.
- Provides configurable rule selection, exclusions, line lengths and complexity thresholds.
- Supports noqa comments for suppressing specific diagnostics on individual lines.
- Allows files and directories to be excluded from analysis or assigned special ignore rules.
- Provides hooks for Git and Mercurial development workflows.
- Supports automated checking through pre-commit and continuous integration tools.
Website: github.com/PyCQA/flake8
Support:
Developer: Tarek Ziade, Ian Cordasco
License: MIT License
Flake8 is written in Python. Learn Python with our recommended free books and free tutorials.
Related Software
| Python Linters | |
|---|---|
| Ruff | Extremely fast Python linter and code formatter |
| ty | Fast Python type checker |
| Mypy | Static type checker for Python |
| Bandit | Find security issues in Python code |
| Pylint | Static code analyser |
| wemake-python-styleguide | Flake8 plugin |
| Tach | Enforces module dependencies and architectural boundaries |
| pycodestyle | Check Python code against style conventions in PEP 8 |
| Pyflakes | Checks Python source files for errors |
| Vulture | Find dead code |
| Pyrefly | Fast type checker and language server |
| Flake8 | Wrapper around PyFlakes and pycodestyle |
| Beartype | Near-real-time hybrid runtime-static type-checker |
| Radon | Computes various metrics from Python code |
| Pyright | Full-featured, standards-compliant static type checker |
| cython-lint | Lint Cython files |
| basedpyright | Fork of pyright |
| Refurb | Modernize Python codebases |
| Pylama | Code audit tool for Python |
| Prospector | Brings together the functionality of other Python analysis tools |
| deptry | Check for dependency issues |
| Fixit | Highly configurable linting framework |
| complexipy | Measures cognitive complexity in Python code |
| Zuban | High-performance Python type checker and language server |
| Pyroma | Rates how well a Python project compiles |
| pydoclint | Python docstring linter |
| Arid | Fast duplicate code detection for Python projects |
Read our verdict in the software roundup.
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