Configuring pylint

It is possible to incorporate pylint results in the TICS output for files. pylint is a static analyzer for Python.

Prerequisites

For a successful pylint integration, the following prerequisites must be met:

• A Python interpreter should be available.
• pylint and its requirements should be available.

Basic configuration

By default, TICS attempts to find pylint on the PATH. Alternatively, a specific Python interpreter and/or a specific pylint instance can be used.

The configuration for pylint can be added to either the SERVER.txt to apply them for all projects, or in PROJECTS.txt to enable project-specific settings. If the properties are declared in the SERVER file and also in the PROJECT file, the project-specific properties will override the global properties.

Syntax

The following properties can (optionally) be declared, either on SERVER or PROJECT level:

'TOOLS' => {
  'pylint' => {
    'INTERPRETER' => '/path/to/python',
    'INSTALLDIR' => '/path/to/directory',
    'PYTHONPATH' => ['/some/path/to/include', '/another/path'],
  }
}

Specifying a Python interpreter

The INTERPRETER property can be used to specify the path to a Python interpreter, such as /usr/bin/python. If this property is not set, the default Python interpreter will be used.

Note that the Python interpreter has an effect on the violations that are produced by pylint. It is recommended to use the interpreter in which the project is supposed to run.

Specifying an installation dir

As an alternative to specifying a Python interpreter, an installation directory can be set through the INSTALLDIR property. This installation directory can either be a full Python installation containing pylint, or a virtual environment with access to pylint.

The installation directory can be specified either as an absolute path (e.g., /usr/local/python), or as a relative path from the chk directory (e.g., pylint).

Specifying additions to the PYTHONPATH

The PYTHONPATH property can be used to extend the python path with directories containing libraries. This property should be a list of paths. All of these will be prepended to the PYTHONPATH environment variable before running pylint.

These paths can be absolute (e.g., /usr/lib/python2.7/dist-packages), but they can be specified relative to the directory in which the project is located. To achieve this, start a path with BRANCH_DIR, e.g., BRANCH_DIR/env/lib.

More information about the PYTHONPATH environment variable can be found in the Python documentation.