edulint 2.8.0

A Python Educational Linter

EduLint

EduLint is a Python linter aimed at helping novice programmers improve their coding style. Presently, it integrates flake8 and pylint, with some tweaks to their default configuration.

This repository contains the linter itself, which is packaged and published as a Pypi package edulint. There is also a web version running at edulint.com for easy use. Its source code is in another repository.

Usage

Web version

Are you just starting with programming in Python? Then the web UI (website, repo) might be the best choice for you.

Python package

You can install the latest release with pip:

python3 -m pip install --user edulint

Once installed, you can run it as a Python module:

python3 -m edulint <file-to-lint>

Read the documentation for more options and configuration details.

Docker container

Don't want to install Python and Edulint as a Python package? You can also run it using Docker.

docker pull edulint/edulint-cli  # Optional

docker run -v ${PWD}:/app edulint/edulint-cli some_file.py

# Additional example that lints a file with absolute path /tmp/some_file.py
docker run -v /tmp:/app edulint/edulint-cli /app/some_file.py

It supports the same configuration options as the native Python package.

Road map (long-term)

• Additional explanations for problems detected in code
• More code quality defects (from WPS; detecting duplicate code)
• Rewrite web to React to allow for additional functionality (more settings, better teacher onboarding, …)
• Speed-up linting by switching to Ruff
• VS Code and Thonny plugins

Sponsorship and academic collaboration

Are you interested in sponsoring this project, want to collaborate on an academic paper, or know of any interesting grants? Feel free to reach out to [e-mail].

Compatibility with other software

Python version

Supported: >= 3.8

Python 3.7 mostly works, but can fail in edge cases due to different parsing between package typed-ast (<=3.7) and Python's native ast (>=3.8). We discovered those using the existing test suite.

Pylint and Flake8

Right now Edulint has pinned specific versions of both packages, because part of the functionality is based on specific format of messages. In future we aim to rework the offending functionality and make it more version independent. For current state you can check the matrix in the GitHub action that tests it.