How can I modify the value of "too-many-statements" from 50 to 100 in the pylintrc file?

When running Pylint on my file I am getting the following message.

refactor (R0915, too-many-statements, function) Too many statements (95/50)

I want to set the number of statements a function can have to 100 instead of 50 in order avoid the above message from Pylint.

1 Answer

Pylint works based on configured settings which are default PEP 8 standards. Now, if customizing them is good or bad can be taken for another discussion, as they are kept like that for a reason. For example, if you have a method with more than 50 lines of code, it simply means that you are increasing the cyclomatic-cognitive complexities as well as making it difficult to unit test and get coverage.

OK, arguments aside, I think the following approach can help you customize the linting rule.

Go to your Python site-packages directory (it might be inside the Python installation Libs folder or in your virtual environment.

For example, D:\Python37\Lib\site-packages

Open a command line here, and navigate to the Pylint directory. Execute the configuration generator like

pylint --generate-rcfile > custom_standard.rc

Now you will have a file named custom_standard.rc in the folder. Let’s copy it to some place around your project, say, D:\lint_config\custom_standard.rc.

Open the configuration file. You can see a setting for most of the rules. Now, for your question of number of statements inside a method, find the setting called

max-statements=50

Change it to:

max-statements=100

Save the configuration file. Now when you run the Pylint executable, use the option --rcfile to specify your custom configuration:

pylint --rcfile=D:\lint_config\custom_standard.rc prject_dir

If you want to integrate this with your IDE like PyCharm there are plugins which allows configuring the same.

But again!, it is not a good decision to change the PEP 8 :-)