Quickstart¶

Install¶

Install in an isolated global environment with pipx:

# Latest PyPI release
pipx install nitpick

# Development branch from GitHub
pipx install git+https://github.com/andreoliwa/nitpick

On macOS/Linux, install the latest release with Homebrew:

brew install andreoliwa/formulae/nitpick

# Development branch from GitHub
brew install andreoliwa/formulae/nitpick --HEAD

On Arch Linux, install with yay:

yay -Syu nitpick

Add to your project with uv:

uv add --dev nitpick

Add to your project with Poetry:

poetry add --dev nitpick

Or install it with pip:

pip install -U nitpick

Run¶

Nitpick will fail if no style is explicitly configured. Run this command to download and use the opinionated default style file:

nitpick init

You can use it as a template to configure your own style.

To fix and modify your files directly:

nitpick fix

To check for errors only:

nitpick check

Nitpick is also a flake8 plugin, so you can run this on a project with at least one Python (.py) file:

flake8 .

Run as a pre-commit hook¶

If you use pre-commit on your project, add this to the .pre-commit-config.yaml in your repository:

There are a few hook IDs available. The recommendation is to choose nitpick-suggest and one of the fix/check hooks.

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/andreoliwa/nitpick
    rev: v0.38.1
    hooks:
      # This hook runs the `nitpick init --fix --suggest` command
      - id: nitpick-suggest

      # Choose only one of the "fix" or "check" hooks.
      # These hooks run the `nitpick fix` command
      - id: nitpick
      # - id: nitpick-fix-all # same as nitpick
      # - id: nitpick-fix
      # These hooks run the `nitpick check` command
      # - id: nitpick-check-all
      # - id: nitpick-check

If you want to run Nitpick as a flake8 plugin instead:

repos:
  - repo: https://github.com/PyCQA/flake8
    rev: 4.0.1
    hooks:
      - id: flake8
        additional_dependencies: [nitpick]

To install the pre-commit and commit-msg Git hooks using prek (pre-commit re-engineered in Rust):

prek install --install-hooks
prek install -t commit-msg

To start checking all your code against the default rules:

prek run --all-files

Run as a MegaLinter plugin¶

If you use MegaLinter you can run Nitpick as a plugin. Add the following two entries to your .mega-linter.yml configuration file:

PLUGINS:
  - https://raw.githubusercontent.com/andreoliwa/nitpick/v0.38.1/mega-linter-plugin-nitpick/nitpick.megalinter-descriptor.yml
ENABLE_LINTERS:
  - NITPICK