How do I disable “missing docstring” warnings at a

Question

Pylint throws errors that some of files are missing docstrings. I try and add docstrings to each class, method and function but it seems that Pylint also checks that files should a docstring at the beginning of it. Can i disable this somehow? I would like to be notified of a docstring is missing inside a class, function or method but it shouldn't be mandatory for a file to have a docstring.

(Is there a term of the legal jargon often found at the beginning of a proprietary source file? Any examples? I don't know whether it is a okay to post such a trivial question separately.)

Answer 1

I came looking for an answer because, as @cerin said, in Django projects it is cumbersome and redundant to add module docstrings to every one of the files that django automatically generates when creating a new app.

So, as a workaround for the fact that pylint doesn't let you specify a difference in docstring types, you can do this:

pylint */*.py --msg-template='{path}: {C}:{line:3d},{column:2d}: {msg}' | grep docstring | grep -v module

You have to update the msg-template so that when you grep you will still know the file name. This returns all the other missing-docstring types excluding modules.

Then you can fix all of those errors, and afterwards just run:

pylint */*.py --disable=missing-docstring

Answer 2

With pylint 2.4 and above you can differentiate between the various missing-docstring by using the three following sub-messages:

• C0114 (missing-module-docstring)
• C0115 (missing-class-docstring)
• C0116 (missing-function-docstring)

So the following .pylintrc file should work:

[MASTER]
disable=
    C0114, # missing-module-docstring