A simple program which checks Python source files for errors.

Pyflakes analyzes programs and detects various errors. It works by parsing the source file, not importing it, so it is safe to use on modules with side effects. It's also much faster.

It is available on PyPI and it supports all active versions of Python: 3.9+.

It can be installed with:

$ pip install --upgrade pyflakes

Useful tips:

• Be sure to install it for a version of Python which is compatible with your codebase: python#.# -m pip install pyflakes (for example, python3.15 -m pip install pyflakes)
• You can also invoke Pyflakes with python#.# -m pyflakes . if you want to run it for a specific python version.
• If you require more options and more flexibility, you could give a look to Flake8 too.

Pyflakes makes a simple promise: it will never complain about style, and it will try very, very hard to never emit false positives.

Pyflakes is also faster than Pylint. This is largely because Pyflakes only examines the syntax tree of each file individually. As a consequence, Pyflakes is more limited in the types of things it can check.

If you like Pyflakes but also want stylistic checks, you want flake8, which combines Pyflakes with style checks against PEP 8 and adds per-project configuration ability.

Share your feedback and ideas: subscribe to the mailing-list

Issues are tracked on GitHub.

Patches may be submitted via a GitHub pull request. If you are comfortable doing so, please rebase your changes so they may be applied to main with a fast-forward merge, and each commit is a coherent unit of work with a well-written log message. If you are not comfortable with this rebase workflow, the project maintainers will be happy to rebase your commits for you.

All changes should include tests and pass flake8.

Please see NEWS.rst.