Error Codes

Grouping

Default conventions

Not all error codes are checked for by default. There are two conventions that may be used by pydocstyle: pep257 and numpy.

The pep257 convention, which is enabled by default in pydocstyle, checks for all of the above errors except for D203, D212, D213, D214, D215, D404, D405, D406, D407, D408, D409, D410, and D411 (as specified in PEP257).

The numpy convention checks for all of the above errors except for D107, D203, D212, D213, D402, and D413.

These conventions may be specified using –convention=<name> when running pydocstyle from the command line or by specifying the convention in a configuration file. See the Usage section for more details.

Publicity

The D1xx group of errors deals with missing docstring in public constructs: modules, classes, methods, etc. It is important to note how publicity is determined and what its effects are.

How publicity is determined

Publicity for all constructs is determined as follows: a construct is considered public if -

  1. Its immediate parent is public and
  2. Its name does not contain a single leading underscore.

A construct’s immediate parent is the construct that contains it. For example, a method’s parent is a class object. A class’ parent is usually a module, but might also be a function, method, etc. A module can either have no parent, or it can have a parent that is a package.

In order for a construct to be considered public, its immediate parent must also be public. Since this definition is recursive, it means that all of its parents need to be public. The corollary is that if a construct is considered private, then all of its descendants are also considered private. For example, a class called _Foo is considered private. A method bar in _Foo is also considered private since its parent is a private class, even though its name does not begin with a single underscore.

Modules are parsed to look if __all__ is defined. If so, only those top level constructs are considered public. The parser looks for __all__ defined as a literal list or tuple. As the parser doesn’t execute the module, any mutation of __all__ will not be considered.

How publicity affects error reports

The immediate effect of a construct being determined as private is that no D1xx errors will be reported for it (or its children, as the previous section explains). A private method, for instance, will not generate a D102 error, even if it has no docstring.

However, it is important to note that while docstring are optional for private construct, they are still required to adhere to your style guide. So if a private module _foo.py does not have a docstring, it will not generate a D100 error, but if it does have a docstring, that docstring might generate other errors.