pylint and pre-commit hook unable to import

Question

My project structure looks like this:

project/
   app/
      main.py
   venv/
   .pylintrc
   .pre-commit-config.yaml

When I am trying to edit project/app/main.py and it fails with

Unable to import 'psycopg2' (import-error)

But when I am trying to pylint this file directly, it works.

.pre-commit-config.yaml looks like this:

-   repo: https://github.com/PyCQA/pylint
    rev: pylint-2.4.2
    hooks:
    -   id: pylint

Answer 1

not sure if this made it into pylint proper but there's a disclaimer on the bottom of pre-commit/mirrors-pylint

pre-commit runs pylint from an isolated virtualenv. Many of pylint's checks perform dynamic analysis which will fail there. You may find configuring pylint as a local hook more useful.

if you have very few dependencies, additional_dependencies might be enough to make it work, but using local hooks for things which need to (~essentially) import your code is probably your best bet

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disclaimer: I'm the author of pre-commit