cardboardlint

Cheap lint solution for PRs.

This is a wrapper for other linters, which only reports messages related to lines that have changed compared to some other commit, e.g. the head of the branch being merged into. It is a simple and more customizable alternative to tools like Hound CI, Stickler CI, Linthub.io, landscape.io etc.

It can be used as follows:

• Add a .cardboardlint.yml to the root of your source tree. It should at least contain a linters section with a list of linters, e.g.

  linters:
  - pylint:
      pylintrc: tools/your_custom_pylintrc
  - cppcheck:
  - import:
  ...

  A list of supported linters is easily deduced from the source code. Just look into the cardboardlint/linter_*.py files. Each of these files has a module docstring with some explanations and a DEFAULT_CONFIG dictionary with the available configuration vars.

  You can repeat any linter multiple times with different configuration settings. This can be useful, e.g. when unit tests must be linted differently than the rest of the source code. This is a simple example where unit tests have a different pylint config:

  linters:
  - pylint:
      pylintrc: tools/pylintrc
      filefilter: ['- test_*.py', '+ *.py']
      exclude:
  - pylint:
      pylintrc: tools/pylintrc_tests
      filefilter: ['+ test_*.py']
  - import:
  ...

  Each linte has a filefilter option, which is a list of rules to test if a file should be considered for linting or not. Each rule consists of a result, + (include) or a - (exclude), followed by a glob pattern. If a pattern matches, the result is found and further rules are not considered. If no rules apply, the file is excluded.

• Install the linters you intend to run (either locally or in your CI environment). These dependencies are not installed automatically because you may not want to use all of them.

  We do provide conda packages for linters, when needed in our channel on Anaconda.org: https://anaconda.org/theochem. For now, we have only added a package for cppcheck.

• Download and install the latest version from git and run the cardboardlinter.

  • Travis-CI (in .travis.yml). This will only report messages for lines that have changed in the PR.

    install:
    # Install the latest cardboardlinter
    - if [ "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" != "false" ]; then
        pip install --upgrade git+https://github.com/theochem/cardboardlint.git@master#egg=cardboardlint;
      fi
    
    script:
    # Run the cardboardlinter, in case of pull requests
    - if [ "$TRAVIS_PULL_REQUEST" != "false" ]; then
        cardboardlinter --refspec $TRAVIS_BRANCH;
      fi

  • Local machine (without venv). This checks all of the code, not just lines that have changed.

    pip install --upgrade --user git+https://github.com/theochem/cardboardlint.git@master#egg=cardboardlint
    cardboardlinter