doc/how_tos/plugins.rst

.. -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

How To Write a Pylint Plugin
============================

Pylint provides support for writing two types of extensions.
First, there is the concept of **checkers**,
which can be used for finding problems in your code.
Secondly, there is also the concept of **transform plugin**,
which represents a way through which the inference and
the capabilities of Pylint can be enhanced
and tailored to a particular module, library of framework.

In general, a plugin is a module which should have a function ``register``,
which takes an instance of ``pylint.lint.PyLinter`` as input.

A plugin can optionally define a function, ``load_configuration``,
which takes an instance of ``pylint.lint.PyLinter`` as input. This
function is called after Pylint loads configuration from configuration
file and command line interface. This function should load additional
plugin specific configuration to Pylint.

So a basic hello-world plugin can be implemented as:

.. sourcecode:: python

  # Inside hello_plugin.py
  def register(linter):
    print('Hello world')


We can run this plugin by placing this module in the PYTHONPATH and invoking
**pylint** as:

.. sourcecode:: bash

  $ pylint -E --load-plugins hello_plugin foo.py
  Hello world

We can extend hello-world plugin to ignore some specific names using
``load_configuration`` function:

.. sourcecode:: python

  # Inside hello_plugin.py
  def register(linter):
    print('Hello world')

  def load_configuration(linter):

    name_checker = get_checker(linter, NameChecker)
    # We consider as good names of variables Hello and World
    name_checker.config.good_names += ('Hello', 'World')

    # We ignore bin directory
    linter.config.black_list += ('bin',)

Depending if we need a **transform plugin** or a **checker**, this might not
be enough. For the former, this is enough to declare the module as a plugin,
but in the case of the latter, we need to register our checker with the linter
object, by calling the following inside the ``register`` function::

    linter.register_checker(OurChecker(linter))

For more information on writing a checker see :ref:`write_a_checker`.