Using Plugins For Fun and Profit
Flake8 is useful on its own but a lot of Flake8’s popularity is due to its extensibility. Our community has developed plugins that augment Flake8’s behaviour. Most of these plugins are uploaded to PyPI. The developers of these plugins often have some style they wish to enforce.
For example, flake8-docstrings adds a check for PEP 257 style conformance. Others attempt to enforce consistency, like flake8-quotes.
Note
The accuracy or reliability of these plugins may vary wildly from plugin to plugin and not all plugins are guaranteed to work with Flake8 3.0.
To install a third-party plugin, make sure that you know which version of Python (or pip) you used to install Flake8. You can then use the most appropriate of:
pip install <plugin-name>
pip3 install <plugin-name>
python -m pip install <plugin-name>
python3 -m pip install <plugin-name>
python3.9 -m pip install <plugin-name>
To install the plugin, where <plugin-name> is the package name on PyPI.
To verify installation use:
flake8 --version
python<version> -m flake8 --version
To see the plugin’s name and version in the output.
See also
After installation, most plugins immediately start reporting errors. Check the plugin’s documentation for which error codes it returns and if it disables any by default.
Note
You can use both flake8 --select and flake8 --ignore
with plugins.
Some plugins register new options, so be sure to check flake8 --help
for new flags and documentation. These plugins may also allow these flags to
be specified in your configuration file. Hopefully, the plugin authors have
documented this for you.
See also