Using Pylint in Ipython (Jupyter-Notebook)

Question

I want to run Pylint or any equivalent while using Jupyter-Notebook. Is there a way to install and run Pylint this way?

Answer 1

To answer the question more specifically in regards to pylint. One relatively simple way to achieve that in a development / ci environment (i.e. command line) is to convert the notebook to Python and then run the linting.

Let's assume you have notebooks in the ./notebooks folder and you have the jupyter and pylint command in the path, you could run the following:

jupyter nbconvert \
    --to=script \
    --output-dir=/tmp/converted-notebooks/ \
    ./notebooks/*.ipynb
pylint /tmp/converted-notebooks/*.py

You might want to configure pylint, as the notebook style is slightly different to a general Python module.

Some rules that you might want to disable:

• pointless-statement
• expression-not-assigned
• trailing-newlines
• wrong-import-position
• redefined-outer-name
• invalid-name

It also appears that the maximum number of characters in a cell (before horizontal scrolling) is 116 but that might depend on other factors.

(These options can for example be configured using the --max-line-length and --disable pylint arguments, or via the .pylintrc file)