pylint-silent 1.4.2
Automatically add code comments to silence the output of pylint
Requires Python: >=3.9
Keywords: pylint

# pylint-silent
**Automatically add code comments to silence the output of [pylint](https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint).**

`pylint` can be very useful in finding software bugs in python code. A good article demonstrating this is [Why Pylint is both useful and unusable, and how you can actually use it](https://pythonspeed.com/articles/pylint/). In short, when running `pylint` on existing code, it tends to output tons of messages.

`pylint-silent` is suppose to make `pylint` usable. The idea is to automatically add code comments of the form `# pylint: disable` to silent every `pylint` message. This will allow you to deploy `pylint` in a Continuous Integration (CI) setup. If a code commit introduces **new** `pylint` messages, these will be visible immediately.

On top of that, all existing `pylint` messages will show up as comments in the code. When you work on a piece of code and see a `pylint` comment, you can try to fix it.

### Install
`pylint-silent` can be installed from [pypi](https://pypi.org/project/pylint-silent/):
```
pip install pylint-silent
```
### Usage
The basic workflow for running `pylint-silent` for the first time is:
```
pylint my_package > pylint.log
pylint-silent apply pylint.log
pylint my_package  # This should return a perfect 10.00 score.
```
**WARNING: `pylint-silent` modifies python files in place.
It is assumed that you are using some version control system.**

For example, if `pylint` produced this message:
```
test.py:35:10: W0613: Unused argument 'name' (unused-argument)
```

`pylint-silent` would add this comment:
```
def func(name):  # pylint: disable=unused-argument
```

If adding the comment would make the line too long, `pylint-silent` would instead add:
```
# pylint: disable-next=unused-argument
def very-long-function-name-with-some-arguments(first_argument, second_argument):
```
`--max-line-length` specfies the maximum line length.
This feature is disabled by default for compatibility with previous versions.
It is disabled by having a default maximum line length of 999.
In the future the default should change to 88.

Another option is to run `pylint-silent --signature` to add a signature to each generated comment:
```
def func(name):  # pylint: disable=unused-argument; silent
```
This way you can easily identify which comments were generated by `pylint-silent`.

For subsequent runs, you probably want to clear the old comments first.
Assuming you are using signatures:
```
pylint-silent reset --signature my_package/*.py  # List all python files here
pylint my_package > pylint.log
pylint-silent apply --signature pylint.log
```

There are two reasons to clear old comments:

1. Remove stale comments to code that was already fixed.
2. `pylint-silent` does not know how to handle lines that already have a `# pylint` comment in them.

To reset or show statistics on all python files in a folder you might want to use the `find` command:
```
find my_package -name "*.py" -exec pylint-silent stats {} +
find my_package -name "*.py" -exec pylint-silent reset {} +
```

### Known limitations
In some cases `pylint-silent` may break your code:
```
FAVICON = base64.decodestring("""  # pylint: disable=deprecated-method
...
```
Luckily, you can simply run `pylint` a second time to detect such cases. In this case `pylint` would ignore the comment because it is part of the string. Therefore, the warning message would still show up. This code has to be fixed manually:
```
FAVICON = base64.decodestring(  # pylint: disable=deprecated-method
"""...
```

Another issue is that messages that involve multiple files cannot be silenced. I'm aware of two such messages:

* cyclic-import
* duplicate-code

You could just disable these messages. Personally I think that these are relevant messages. So instead I just modify `pylint` score calculation to something like:
```
evaluation=10.0 + 0.15 - 10 * ((float(5 * error + warning + refactor + convention) / statement) * 10)
```
The `0.15` artificially raises the score to 10.0 and makes `pylint` return a success code. The factor of `10 *` increases the score sensitivity, which, by default, is way too low even for a medium sized project.

`pylint` also lets you disable a checks on a block of code:
```
# pylint: disable=unused-import
import time
import sys
# pylint: enable=unused-import
```
`pylint-silent` would ignore these blocks. `pylint-silent reset` would not clear these messages and `pylint-silent stats` would not count them.

### Alternatives

An alternative solution to `pylint` noise is [pylint-ignore](https://pypi.org/project/pylint-ignore/).
Whichever option you choose, I recommend reading their documentation about how `pylint` should be used.

### Summary
`pylint`'s motto is: **It's not just a linter that annoys you!**

`pylint-silent` helps `pylint` live up to its motto.

### Changelog

#### 1.4.2 (2025-10-07)

* Update compatible python versions to python 3.9 through 3.14.

#### 1.4.1 (2024-04-28)

* Preserve file permissions also during reset. Fixes #6.

#### 1.4 (2024-02-11)

* Update compatible python versions to currently supported python 3.8 through 3.12.

#### 1.3 (2023-05-12)

* Mark every pylint-silent comment with a signature. Fixes #4. PR #5.
* Add a --max-line-length option. Fixes #3.
* Fix tests for pylint 2.16. Require pylint >= 2.16 for the tests.

#### 1.2 (2022-12-23)

* Preserve comments meant for other non-pylint tools. PR #2.

#### 1.1.2 (2022-11-30)

* Use pyproject.toml instead of setup.py.
* Update compatible python versions to currently supported python 3.7 through 3.11.
* Fix bug in `pylint-silent stats` that got confused with `=` symbols in code.
* Document in README.md how to reset or get statistics on all files in folder.

#### 1.1.1 (2021-04-13)

* Preserve file permissions in generated code. Fixes #1.

#### 1.1 (2021-03-04)

* Ignore disable/enable blocks.
* Add reference to pylint-ignore in the README.
* Add testing based on pytest and tox.
* Handle missing-module-docstring correctly.

#### 1.0.1 (2020-07-22)

* Fix link from pypi.org to github.
* Fix markdown in README.md.

#### 1.0 (2020-07-20)

* Initial release.