Installing & Setting Up PyLint

Dan Bader

Writing Cleaner Python Code With PyLint Dan Bader 01:34

After meeting PyLint, you’ll install it in this session and set it up properly.

If you want to learn more about virtual environments, make sure to check out our course about Working With Python Virtual Environments!

00:00 All right, so I’m going to show you how to set up Pylint now. So in this case, I’ve got this little example file here. And it doesn’t look great, right?

00:09 It’s sorta… not very good Python code. There’s an unused variable here, the naming is kind of off, the formatting is off. And we’re going to take that as an example to see what Pylint can do with this file. And so over here, I’ve got a virtual environment set up because, generally, I recommend that you install any sort of Python tool, any sort of Python dependency into a virtual environment.

00:33 And I’ve got a longer in-depth course on that if you’re interested, but it’s not really in the scope of this tutorial. So, here you can see I’ve got this example file here in this directory that I’m in right now. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to install Pylint.

00:49 So, Pylint is just a Python module, essentially, that you install. So you can install it through pip or conda—pretty much any package manager you would want to use.

01:00 I’m just going to go ahead and install the Pylint module now, which also includes a command line tool that’s called pylint, and this will also be set up now. All right, so now I’ve installed it. And we can just make sure that Pylint is actually installed and it’s available here.

01:16 We can just run pylint by itself or on its own, then you’re going to get a bunch of helpful information on how to use the program. As you can see here, Pylint is pretty extensive when it comes to its configuration.

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