rust-clippy

A collection of lints to catch common mistakes and improve your Rust code.

There are 208 lints included in this crate!

More to come, please file an issue if you have ideas!

Table of contents:

• Usage instructions
• Configuration
• License

Usage

Since this is a tool for helping the developer of a library or application write better code, it is recommended not to include clippy as a hard dependency. Options include using it as an optional dependency, as a cargo subcommand, or as an included feature during build. All of these options are detailed below.

As a general rule clippy will only work with the latest Rust nightly for now.

Optional dependency

If you want to make clippy an optional dependency, you can do the following:

In your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
clippy = {version = "*", optional = true}

[features]
default = []

And, in your main.rs or lib.rs, add these lines:

#![cfg_attr(feature="clippy", feature(plugin))]
#![cfg_attr(feature="clippy", plugin(clippy))]

Then build by enabling the feature: cargo +nightly build --features "clippy".

Instead of adding the cfg_attr attributes you can also run clippy on demand: cargo rustc --features clippy -- -Z no-trans -Z extra-plugins=clippy (the -Z no trans, while not necessary, will stop the compilation process after typechecking (and lints) have completed, which can significantly reduce the runtime).

As a cargo subcommand (cargo clippy)

An alternate way to use clippy is by installing clippy through cargo as a cargo subcommand.

cargo install clippy

Now you can run clippy by invoking cargo clippy, or rustup run nightly cargo clippy directly from a directory that is usually compiled with stable.

In case you are not using rustup, you need to set the environment flag SYSROOT during installation so clippy knows where to find librustc and similar crates.

SYSROOT=/path/to/rustc/sysroot cargo install clippy

Running clippy from the command line without installing

To have cargo compile your crate with clippy without needing #![plugin(clippy)] in your code, you can use:

cargo rustc -- -L /path/to/clippy_so/dir/ -Z extra-plugins=clippy

Note: Be sure that clippy was compiled with the same version of rustc that cargo invokes here!

As a Compiler Plugin

Note: This is not a recommended installation method.

Since stable Rust is backwards compatible, you should be able to compile your stable programs with nightly Rust with clippy plugged in to circumvent this.

Add in your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
clippy = "*"

You then need to add #![feature(plugin)] and #![plugin(clippy)] to the top of your crate entry point (main.rs or lib.rs).

Sample main.rs:

#![feature(plugin)]

#![plugin(clippy)]


fn main(){
    let x = Some(1u8);
    match x {
        Some(y) => println!("{:?}", y),
        _ => ()
    }
}

Produces this warning:

src/main.rs:8:5: 11:6 warning: you seem to be trying to use match for destructuring a single type. Consider using `if let`, #[warn(single_match)] on by default
src/main.rs:8     match x {
src/main.rs:9         Some(y) => println!("{:?}", y),
src/main.rs:10         _ => ()
src/main.rs:11     }
src/main.rs:8:5: 11:6 help: Try
if let Some(y) = x { println!("{:?}", y) }

Configuration

Some lints can be configured in a clippy.toml file. It contains basic variable = value mapping eg.

blacklisted-names = ["toto", "tata", "titi"]
cyclomatic-complexity-threshold = 30

See the wiki for more information about which lints can be configured and the meaning of the variables.

You can also specify the path to the configuration file with:

#![plugin(clippy(conf_file="path/to/clippy's/configuration"))]

To deactivate the “for further information visit wiki-link” message you can define the CLIPPY_DISABLE_DOCS_LINKS environment variable.

Allowing/denying lints

You can add options to allow/warn/deny:

• the whole set of Warn lints using the clippy lint group (#![deny(clippy)])

• all lints using both the clippy and clippy_pedantic lint groups (#![deny(clippy)], #![deny(clippy_pedantic)]). Note that clippy_pedantic contains some very aggressive lints prone to false positives.

• only some lints (#![deny(single_match, box_vec)], etc)

• allow/warn/deny can be limited to a single function or module using #[allow(...)], etc

Note: deny produces errors instead of warnings.

For convenience, cargo clippy automatically defines a cargo-clippy features. This lets you set lints level and compile with or without clippy transparently:

#[cfg_attr(feature = "cargo-clippy", allow(needless_lifetimes))]

Updating rustc

Sometimes, rustc moves forward without clippy catching up. Therefore updating rustc may leave clippy a non-functional state until we fix the resulting breakage.

You can use the rust-update script to update rustc only if clippy would also update correctly.

License

Licensed under MPL. If you're having issues with the license, let me know and I'll try to change it to something more permissive.