A flake8 plugin that helps you write tidier imports.

• Free software: ISC license

Install from pip with:

pip install flake8-tidy-imports

It will then automatically be run as part of flake8; you can check it has been picked up with:

$ flake8 --version
2.4.1 (pep8: 1.7.0, pyflakes: 0.8.1, flake8-tidy-imports: 1.0.0, mccabe: 0.3.1) CPython 2.7.11 on Darwin

Config for rule I201 (see below). A map where each line is a banned import string, followed by '=', then the message to use when encountering that banned import. Note that despite the name, you can ban imported objects too, since the syntax is the same, such as decimal.Decimal.

There is also a special directive to ban a preselected list of removed/moved modules between Python 2 and Python 3, recommending replacements, from six where possible. It can be turned on by adding {python2to3} to the list of banned-modules.

Whilst the option can be passed on the commandline, it's much easier to configure it in your config file, such as setup.cfg, for example:

[flake8]
banned-modules = mock = use unittest.mock!
                 urlparse = use six.moves.urllib.parse!
                 {python2to3}

Currently this plugin has two rules.

Complains about unnecessary import aliasing of three forms:

• import foo as foo -> import foo
• import foo.bar as bar -> from foo import bar
• from foo import bar as bar -> from foo import bar

The message includes the suggested rewrite (which may not be correct at current), for example:

$ flake8 file.py
file.py:1:1: I200 Unnecessary import alias - rewrite as 'from foo import bar'.

Complains about importing of banned imports. This might be useful when refactoring code, for example when moving from Python 2 to 3. By default there are no imports banned - you should configure them with banned-modules as described above in 'Options'.

The message includes a user-defined part that comes from the configuration. For example:

$ flake8 file.py
file.py:1:1: I201 Banned import 'mock' used - use unittest.mock instead.