Contributor installation#

Basic installation#

Pylint is developed using the git distributed version control system.

You can clone Pylint using

git clone https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint

Before you start testing your code, you need to install your source-code package locally. Suppose you just cloned pylint with the previous git clone command. To set up your environment for testing, open a terminal and run:

cd pylint
python3 -m venv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements_test_min.txt

This ensures your testing environment is similar to Pylint's testing environment on GitHub.

Optionally (Because there's an auto-fix if you open a merge request): We have pre-commit hooks which should take care of the autoformatting for you before each commit. To enable it, run pre-commit install in the pylint root directory.

Astroid installation#

If you're testing new changes in astroid you need to also clone astroid and install with an editable installation alongside pylint as follows:

# Suppose you're in the pylint directory
git clone https://github.com/PyCQA/astroid.git
python3 -m pip install -e astroid/

You're now using the local astroid in pylint and can control the version with git for example:

cd astroid/
git switch my-astroid-dev-branch