Flake8 Scout Rule

The Scout Rule: Leave Your Code Better Than You Found It

We all strive to be good digital citizens, right? The Scout Rule is a simple idea: always leave your code cleaner than you found it.

But let's face it, dealing with legacy code can be a real pain. It might not follow best practices or have linting rules in place.

Introducing the Flake8 Scout Rule!

This handy tool is like a digital cleanup crew. It works in two steps:

1. Finds the Mess: It runs flake8 to identify all the coding mistakes.
2. Adds a Note: It politely adds a # noqa: <errors> comment next to each issue, basically saying, "Hey, future developer, this code needs some love."

Why Use It?

• Gentle Introduction to New Linting Rules: It doesn't force you to fix everything at once.
• Teamwork Makes the Dream Work: Your team can gradually clean up the code together.
• Easy to Use: No need to manually annotate files, this formatter is easy and does it for you.

How It Works:

1. Configure Flake8: Set up Flake8 with the rules you want to enforce.
2. Run the Flake8 Scout Rule Formatter: Let the Flake8 Scout Rule do its magic.
3. Collaborate: Agree with your team that whenever someone touches a file with those # noqa comments, they'll take a moment to fix the underlying issues, if it makes sense to do so.

By following this approach, you can gradually improve your codebase, one commit at a time.

How to run

First install flake8 and flake8-scout-rule

pip install flake8 flake8-scout-rule

Then run flake8-scout-rule like this, as a flake8 formatter

flake8 --format=scout .

Note: The formatter is compatible with all valid Flake8 options. It is particularly beneficial to use this formatter with the --select and --ignore Flake8 options.

No prompt option

This option automatically update files with violations without prompting the user to review the violations.

flake8 --format=scout --no-prompt .

License

Free software: MIT License

Credits

This package was created by Zach Attas aka snackattas, but couldn't have been possible without flake8!