You can read more about Pylint online. Let’s just dive into their documentation, in particular on how to run Pylint where they describe the usage of configuration files. Pylint looks for the following locations:

  1. pylintrc in the current working directory
  2. .pylintrc in the current working directory. I would recommend using this option for every project as it fits in with many other dot configuration files that other libraries use.
  3. If the current working directory is in a Python module, Pylint searches up the hierarchy of Python modules until it finds a pylintrc file. This allows you to specify coding standards on a module-by-module basis. Of course, a directory is judged to be a Python module if it contains an __init__.py file.
  4. The file named by environment variable PYLINTRC. This option might be useful when running continuous integrations and you want to switch between configuration files without changing the actual files or pylint command arguments.
  5. if you have a home directory which isn’t /root: 5.1. .pylintrc in your home directory 5.2. .config/pylintrc in your home directory
  6. /etc/pylintrc for global configuration of machines. I would avoid this for any hidden configuration mystery bugs.

I would avoid all options after 2 because it won’t be project specific and difficult to share automatically. If it is a project specific configuration file, then it can be checked into a repository and anyone who is working on the codebase will have the same configuration. A very useful command is:

pylint --generate-rcfile

which will print the current pylint configuration to the standard output. You can easily pipe this output to a file in order to freeze the current configuration. I would recommend starting fresh with this command and then modifying as you go along.