Python static code analysis with pychecker

Python tool PyChecker is used to find typical programming errors in your source code. In order to install it you need download it and install manually (if you try install it using easy_install it will not work, unfortunately). We will assume the following directory structure (note, devenv is virtual environment, you can create it issuing virtualenv devenv).

~/devenv/
`-- trunk/
    |-- src/
    |   `-- greatings/
    |       |-- __init__.py
    |       |-- helloworld.py
    |       `-- tests/
    |           |-- __init__.py
    |           `-- test_helloworld.py
    `-- tools/

Let download pychecker into tools directory and proceed with installation:

user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk$ wget -P tools/ http://downloads.\
sourceforge.net/project/pychecker/pychecker/0.8.18/\
pychecker-0.8.18.tar.gz
...
user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk$  cd tools && tar zxf \
pychecker-0.8.18.tar.gz \
 && cd  pychecker-0.8.18
user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk/tools/pychecker-0.8.18$ \
../../../bin/python setup.py install && cd ../.. && \
rm -rf tools/pychecker-0.8.18
...

The next step you need to "fix" a bit a pychecker file installed into your virtual environment bin directory so the content look like this.

#!/bin/sh

site_packages_dir=$(dirname $0)/../lib/python2.6/site-packages
python $site_packages_dir/pychecker/checker.py "$@"

Since pychecker import all the files it is going to check, you need to start the tool in correct directory, in our case src:

user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk$ cd src/
user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk/src$ ../../bin/pychecker greatings/*.py
Processing module helloworld (greatings/helloworld.py)...
Processing module __init__ (greatings/__init__.py)...

Warnings...

None

Please note that pychecker doesn't drill into sub-packages, so in order to analyze tests issue the following command:

../../bin/pychecker greatings/tests/*.py

If you want to change the default behaviour, you can define options in pycheckrc file (use -F option to specify a location). Here is an example.

user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk$ wget -P tools/ http://pychecker.\
cvs.sourceforge.net/viewvc/pychecker/pychecker/pycheckrc
user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk$ cd src/
user1@deby:~/devenv/trunk/src$ ../../bin/pychecker -F \
../tools/pycheckrc greatings/*.py

Read more about pychecker here and here.