flake8-black 0.0.3

Introduction

This is an MIT licensed flake8 plugin for validating Python code style with the command line code formatting tool black. It is available to install from the Python Package Index (PyPI):

• https://pypi-hypernode.com/pypi/flake8-black

Black, “The Uncompromising Code Formatter”, is normally run to edit your Python code in place to match their coding style, a strict subset of the PEP 8 style guide.

The point of this plugin is to be able to run black --check ... from within the flake8 plugin ecosystem. You might use this via a git pre-commit hook, or as part of your continuous integration testing.

Flake8 Validation codes

Early versions of flake8 assumed a single character prefix for the validation codes, which became problematic with collisions in the plugin ecosystem. Since v3.0, flake8 has supported longer prefixes, therefore this plugin uses BLK as its prefix.

Note that if your Python code has a syntax error, black --check ... would report this as an error. Likewise flake8 ... will by default report the syntax error, but importantly it does not seem to then call the plugins, so you will not get an additional BLK error.

Installation and usage

Python 3.6 or later is required to run black, so that is recommended, but black can be used on Python code written for older versions of Python.

Install flake8-black using pip, which should install flake8 and black as well if not already present:

$ pip install flake8-black

The new validator should be automatically included when using flake8 which may now report additional validation codes starting with BLK (as defined above). For example:

$ flake8 example.py

You can request only the BLK codes be shown using:

$ flake8 --select BLK example.py

We recommend using the following settings in your flake8 configuration, for example in your .flake8 configuration:

[flake8]
# Recommend matching the black default line length of 88,
# rather than the flake8 default of 79:
max-line-length = 88
extend-ignore =
    # See https://github.com/PyCQA/pycodestyle/issues/373
    E203,

In order not to trigger flake8’s E501 line too long errors, the plugin passes the flake8 maximum line length when it calls black, equivalent to doing black -l 88 --check *.py at the command line.

Note currently pycodestyle gives false positives on the spaces black uses for slices, which flake8 reports as E203: whitespace before ':'. Until pyflakes issue 373 is fixed, and flake8 is updated, we suggest disabling this style check.

Version History

Developers

This plugin is on GitHub at https://github.com/peterjc/flake8-black

To make a new release once tested locally and on TravisCI:

$ git tag vX.Y.Z
$ python setup.py sdist --formats=gztar
$ twine upload dist/flake8-black-X.Y.Z.tar.gz
$ git push origin master --tags

TODO

• Define different error codes based on what changes black would make?

• Create a full test suite and use this for continuous integration.