How to use typeshed with mypy?

Question

I cloned typeshed but I can't figure out how to tell mypy to use the type hints it contains, I see no option in mypy --help. The mypy repo does contain reference to the typeshed repo, but pip installing it doesn't not download it.

Answer 1

Mypy comes bundled with typeshed by default, so you shouldn't need to do anything -- simply doing pip install mypy will install it correctly.

Note that typeshed is not a Python module, so it isn't possible to import it or otherwise access it from a Python program unless you literally look at the location in the filesystem the stubs are stored.

Answer 2

Since version 0.4.6 mypy has the option --custom-typeshed:

mypy --py2 --custom-typeshed ~/REPOS/PYTHON/mypy/typeshed my-thing.py

See command line reference for the documentation and Issue 2323 for the gory details.