CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing to Ruff

Welcome! We're happy to have you here. Thank you in advance for your contribution to Ruff.

• The Basics
  • Prerequisites
  • Development
  • Project Structure
  • Example: Adding a new lint rule
    • Rule naming convention
  • Example: Adding a new configuration option
• MkDocs
• Release Process
• Benchmarks

The Basics

Ruff welcomes contributions in the form of Pull Requests.

For small changes (e.g., bug fixes), feel free to submit a PR.

For larger changes (e.g., new lint rules, new functionality, new configuration options), consider creating an issue outlining your proposed change. You can also join us on Discord to discuss your idea with the community.

If you're looking for a place to start, we recommend implementing a new lint rule (see: Adding a new lint rule, which will allow you to learn from and pattern-match against the examples in the existing codebase. Many lint rules are inspired by existing Python plugins, which can be used as a reference implementation.

As a concrete example: consider taking on one of the rules from the flake8-pyi plugin, and looking to the originating Python source for guidance.

Prerequisites

Ruff is written in Rust. You'll need to install the Rust toolchain for development.

You'll also need Insta to update snapshot tests:

cargo install cargo-insta

Development

After cloning the repository, run Ruff locally with:

cargo run -p ruff_cli -- check /path/to/file.py --no-cache

Prior to opening a pull request, ensure that your code has been auto-formatted, and that it passes both the lint and test validation checks:

cargo fmt  # Auto-formatting...
cargo clippy --fix --workspace --all-targets --all-features  # Linting...
cargo test  # Testing...

These checks will run on GitHub Actions when you open your Pull Request, but running them locally will save you time and expedite the merge process.

Note that many code changes also require updating the snapshot tests, which is done interactively after running cargo test like so:

cargo insta review

If you have pre-commit installed then you can use it to assist with formatting and linting. The following command will run the pre-commit hooks:

pre-commit run --all-files

Your Pull Request will be reviewed by a maintainer, which may involve a few rounds of iteration prior to merging.

Project Structure

Ruff is structured as a monorepo with a flat crate structure, such that all crates are contained in a flat crates directory.

The vast majority of the code, including all lint rules, lives in the ruff crate (located at crates/ruff). As a contributor, that's the crate that'll be most relevant to you.

At time of writing, the repository includes the following crates:

• crates/ruff: library crate containing all lint rules and the core logic for running them.
• crates/ruff_cli: binary crate containing Ruff's command-line interface.
• crates/ruff_dev: binary crate containing utilities used in the development of Ruff itself (e.g., cargo dev generate-all).
• crates/ruff_macros: library crate containing macros used by Ruff.
• crates/ruff_python: library crate implementing Python-specific functionality (e.g., lists of standard library modules by versionb).
• crates/flake8_to_ruff: binary crate for generating Ruff configuration from Flake8 configuration.

Example: Adding a new lint rule

At a high level, the steps involved in adding a new lint rule are as follows:

1. Determine a name for the new rule as per our rule naming convention.
2. Create a file for your rule (e.g., crates/ruff/src/rules/flake8_bugbear/rules/abstract_base_class.rs).
3. In that file, define a violation struct. You can grep for #[violation] to see examples.
4. Map the violation struct to a rule code in crates/ruff/src/registry.rs (e.g., E402).
5. Define the logic for triggering the violation in crates/ruff/src/checkers/ast.rs (for AST-based checks), crates/ruff/src/checkers/tokens.rs (for token-based checks), crates/ruff/src/checkers/lines.rs (for text-based checks), or crates/ruff/src/checkers/filesystem.rs (for filesystem-based checks).
6. Add a test fixture.
7. Update the generated files (documentation and generated code).

To define the violation, start by creating a dedicated file for your rule under the appropriate rule linter (e.g., crates/ruff/src/rules/flake8_bugbear/rules/abstract_base_class.rs). That file should contain a struct defined via #[violation], along with a function that creates the violation based on any required inputs.

To trigger the violation, you'll likely want to augment the logic in crates/ruff/src/checkers/ast.rs, which defines the Python AST visitor, responsible for iterating over the abstract syntax tree and collecting diagnostics as it goes.

If you need to inspect the AST, you can run cargo dev print-ast with a Python file. Grep for the Check::new invocations to understand how other, similar rules are implemented.

To add a test fixture, create a file under crates/ruff/resources/test/fixtures/[linter], named to match the code you defined earlier (e.g., crates/ruff/resources/test/fixtures/pycodestyle/E402.py). This file should contain a variety of violations and non-violations designed to evaluate and demonstrate the behavior of your lint rule.

Run cargo dev generate-all to generate the code for your new fixture. Then run Ruff locally with (e.g.) cargo run -p ruff_cli -- check crates/ruff/resources/test/fixtures/pycodestyle/E402.py --no-cache --select E402.

Once you're satisfied with the output, codify the behavior as a snapshot test by adding a new test_case macro in the relevant crates/ruff/src/[linter]/mod.rs file. Then, run cargo test. Your test will fail, but you'll be prompted to follow-up with cargo insta review. Accept the generated snapshot, then commit the snapshot file alongside the rest of your changes.

Finally, regenerate the documentation and generated code with cargo dev generate-all.

Rule naming convention

The rule name should make sense when read as "allow rule-name" or "allow rule-name items".

This implies that rule names:

• should state the bad thing being checked for

• should not contain instructions on what you what you should use instead (these belong in the rule documentation and the autofix_title for rules that have autofix)

When re-implementing rules from other linters, this convention is given more importance than preserving the original rule name.

Example: Adding a new configuration option

Ruff's user-facing settings live in a few different places.

First, the command-line options are defined via the Cli struct in crates/ruff/src/cli.rs.

Second, the pyproject.toml options are defined in crates/ruff/src/settings/options.rs (via the Options struct), crates/ruff/src/settings/configuration.rs (via the Configuration struct), and crates/ruff/src/settings/mod.rs (via the Settings struct). These represent, respectively: the schema used to parse the pyproject.toml file; an internal, intermediate representation; and the final, internal representation used to power Ruff.

To add a new configuration option, you'll likely want to modify these latter few files (along with cli.rs, if appropriate). If you want to pattern-match against an existing example, grep for dummy_variable_rgx, which defines a regular expression to match against acceptable unused variables (e.g., _).

Note that plugin-specific configuration options are defined in their own modules (e.g., crates/ruff/src/flake8_unused_arguments/settings.rs).

You may also want to add the new configuration option to the flake8-to-ruff tool, which is responsible for converting flake8 configuration files to Ruff's TOML format. This logic lives in crates/ruff/src/flake8_to_ruff/converter.rs.

Finally, regenerate the documentation and generated code with cargo dev generate-all.

MkDocs

To preview any changes to the documentation locally:

1. Install MkDocs and Material for MkDocs with:

   pip install -r docs/requirements.txt

2. Generate the MkDocs site with:

   python scripts/generate_mkdocs.py

3. Run the development server with:

   mkdocs serve

The documentation should then be available locally at http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs/.

Release Process

As of now, Ruff has an ad hoc release process: releases are cut with high frequency via GitHub Actions, which automatically generates the appropriate wheels across architectures and publishes them to PyPI.

Ruff follows the semver versioning standard. However, as pre-1.0 software, even patch releases may contain non-backwards-compatible changes.

Ecosystem CI

GitHub Actions will run your changes against a number of real-world projects from GitHub and report on any diagnostic differences. You can also run those checks locally via:

python scripts/check_ecosystem.py path/to/your/ruff path/to/older/ruff

You can also run the Ecosystem CI check in a Docker container across a larger set of projects by downloading the known-github-tomls.json as github_search.jsonl and following the instructions in scripts/Dockerfile.ecosystem. Note that this check will take a while to run.

Benchmarks

First, clone CPython. It's a large and diverse Python codebase, which makes it a good target for benchmarking.

git clone --branch 3.10 https://github.com/python/cpython.git crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython

To benchmark the release build:

cargo build --release && hyperfine --ignore-failure --warmup 10 \
  "./target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/ --no-cache" \
  "./target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/"

Benchmark 1: ./target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/ --no-cache
  Time (mean ± σ):     293.8 ms ±   3.2 ms    [User: 2384.6 ms, System: 90.3 ms]
  Range (min … max):   289.9 ms … 301.6 ms    10 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Benchmark 2: ./target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/
  Time (mean ± σ):      48.0 ms ±   3.1 ms    [User: 65.2 ms, System: 124.7 ms]
  Range (min … max):    45.0 ms …  66.7 ms    62 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Summary
  './target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/' ran
    6.12 ± 0.41 times faster than './target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/ --no-cache'

To benchmark against the ecosystem's existing tools:

hyperfine --ignore-failure --warmup 5 \
  "./target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/ --no-cache" \
  "pyflakes crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython" \
  "autoflake --recursive --expand-star-imports --remove-all-unused-imports --remove-unused-variables --remove-duplicate-keys resources/test/cpython" \
  "pycodestyle crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython" \
  "flake8 crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython"

Benchmark 1: ./target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/ --no-cache
  Time (mean ± σ):     294.3 ms ±   3.3 ms    [User: 2467.5 ms, System: 89.6 ms]
  Range (min … max):   291.1 ms … 302.8 ms    10 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Benchmark 2: pyflakes crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython
  Time (mean ± σ):     15.786 s ±  0.143 s    [User: 15.560 s, System: 0.214 s]
  Range (min … max):   15.640 s … 16.157 s    10 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Benchmark 3: autoflake --recursive --expand-star-imports --remove-all-unused-imports --remove-unused-variables --remove-duplicate-keys resources/test/cpython
  Time (mean ± σ):      6.175 s ±  0.169 s    [User: 54.102 s, System: 1.057 s]
  Range (min … max):    5.950 s …  6.391 s    10 runs

Benchmark 4: pycodestyle crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython
  Time (mean ± σ):     46.921 s ±  0.508 s    [User: 46.699 s, System: 0.202 s]
  Range (min … max):   46.171 s … 47.863 s    10 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Benchmark 5: flake8 crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython
  Time (mean ± σ):     12.260 s ±  0.321 s    [User: 102.934 s, System: 1.230 s]
  Range (min … max):   11.848 s … 12.933 s    10 runs

  Warning: Ignoring non-zero exit code.

Summary
  './target/release/ruff ./crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython/ --no-cache' ran
   20.98 ± 0.62 times faster than 'autoflake --recursive --expand-star-imports --remove-all-unused-imports --remove-unused-variables --remove-duplicate-keys resources/test/cpython'
   41.66 ± 1.18 times faster than 'flake8 crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython'
   53.64 ± 0.77 times faster than 'pyflakes crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython'
  159.43 ± 2.48 times faster than 'pycodestyle crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython'

You can run poetry install from ./scripts to create a working environment for the above. All reported benchmarks were computed using the versions specified by ./scripts/pyproject.toml on Python 3.11.

To benchmark Pylint, remove the following files from the CPython repository:

rm Lib/test/bad_coding.py \
  Lib/test/bad_coding2.py \
  Lib/test/bad_getattr.py \
  Lib/test/bad_getattr2.py \
  Lib/test/bad_getattr3.py \
  Lib/test/badcert.pem \
  Lib/test/badkey.pem \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_3131.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future10.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future3.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future4.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future5.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future6.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future7.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future8.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_future9.py \
  Lib/test/badsyntax_pep3120.py \
  Lib/test/test_asyncio/test_runners.py \
  Lib/test/test_copy.py \
  Lib/test/test_inspect.py \
  Lib/test/test_typing.py

Then, from crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython, run: time pylint -j 0 -E $(git ls-files '*.py'). This will execute Pylint with maximum parallelism and only report errors.

To benchmark Pyupgrade, run the following from crates/ruff/resources/test/cpython:

hyperfine --ignore-failure --warmup 5 --prepare "git reset --hard HEAD" \
  "find . -type f -name \"*.py\" | xargs -P 0 pyupgrade --py311-plus"

Benchmark 1: find . -type f -name "*.py" | xargs -P 0 pyupgrade --py311-plus
  Time (mean ± σ):     30.119 s ±  0.195 s    [User: 28.638 s, System: 0.390 s]
  Range (min … max):   29.813 s … 30.356 s    10 runs