How do I get Pylint to recognize NumPy members?

Question

If using Visual Studio Code with Don Jayamanne's excellent Python extension, add a user setting to whitelist NumPy:

{
    // Whitelist NumPy to remove lint errors
    "python.linting.pylintArgs": [
        "--extension-pkg-whitelist=numpy"
    ]
}

I had the same issue here, even with the latest versions of all related packages (astroid 1.3.2, logilab_common 0.63.2, pylon 1.4.0).

The following solution worked like a charm: I added numpy to the list of ignored modules by modifying my pylintrc file, in the [TYPECHECK] section:

[TYPECHECK]

ignored-modules = numpy

Depending on the error, you might also need to add the following line (still in the [TYPECHECK] section):

ignored-classes = numpy

I was getting the same error for a small NumPy project I was working on and decided that ignoring the NumPy modules would do just fine. I created a .pylintrc file with:

$ pylint --generate-rcfile > ~/.pylintrc

And following paduwan's and j_houg's advice I modified the following sectors:

[MASTER]

# A comma-separated list of package or module names from where C extensions may
# be loaded. Extensions are loading into the active Python interpreter and may
# run arbitrary code
extension-pkg-whitelist=numpy

and

[TYPECHECK]

# List of module names for which member attributes should not be checked
# (useful for modules/projects where namespaces are manipulated during runtime
# and thus existing member attributes cannot be deduced by static analysis. It
# supports qualified module names, as well as Unix pattern matching.
ignored-modules=numpy

# List of classes names for which member attributes should not be checked
# (useful for classes with attributes dynamically set). This supports can work
# with qualified names.
ignored-classes=numpy

and it "fixed" my issue.

In recent versions of Pylint you can add --extension-pkg-whitelist=numpy to your Pylint command.

They had fixed this problem in an earlier version in an unsafe way. Now if you want them to look more carefully at a package outside of the standard library, you must explicitly whitelist it. See here.

Since this is the top result in Google Search and it gave me the impression that you have to ignore those warnings in all files:

The problem has actually been fixed in the sources of Pylint/astroid last month https://bitbucket.org/logilab/astroid/commits/83d78af4866be5818f193360c78185e1008fd29e but are not yet in the Ubuntu packages.

To get the sources, just

hg clone https://bitbucket.org/logilab/pylint/
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/logilab/astroid
mkdir logilab && touch logilab/__init__.py
hg clone http://hg.logilab.org/logilab/common logilab/common
cd pylint && python setup.py install

whereby the last step will most likely require a sudo and of course you need Mercurial to clone.

For ignoring all the errors generated by numpy.core‘s attributes, we can now use:

$ pylint a.py --generated-members=numpy.*

As another solution, add this option to ~/.pylintrc or /etc/pylintrc file:

[TYPECHECK]

# List of members which are set dynamically and missed by pylint inference
# system, and so shouldn't trigger E1101 when accessed. Python regular
# expressions are accepted.
generated-members=numpy.*

This feature was introduced in PyLint 1.6.0. It should be noted that code snippet from original question passed linting with this version even without any additional settings. However, this is useful in more complex cases.