rust/book/src/usage.md

Usage

This chapter describes how to use Clippy to get the most out of it. Clippy can be used as a cargo subcommand or, like rustc, directly with the clippy-driver binary.

Note: This chapter assumes that you have Clippy installed already. If you're not sure, take a look at the Installation chapter.

Cargo subcommand

The easiest and most common way to run Clippy is through cargo. To do that, just run

cargo clippy

Lint configuration

The above command will run the default set of lints, which are included in the lint group clippy::all. You might want to use even more lints, or you may not agree with every Clippy lint, and for that there are ways to configure lint levels.

Note: Clippy is meant to be used with a generous sprinkling of #[allow(..)]s through your code. So if you disagree with a lint, don't feel bad disabling them for parts of your code or the whole project.

Command line

You can configure lint levels on the command line by adding -A/W/D clippy::lint_name like this:

cargo clippy -- -Aclippy::style -Wclippy::double_neg -Dclippy::perf

For CI all warnings can be elevated to errors which will inturn fail the build and cause Clippy to exit with a code other than 0.

cargo clippy -- -Dwarnings

Note: Adding -D warnings will cause your build to fail if any warnings are found in your code. That includes warnings found by rustc (e.g. dead_code, etc.).

For more information on configuring lint levels, see the rustc documentation.

Even more lints

Clippy has lint groups which are allow-by-default. This means, that you will have to enable the lints in those groups manually.

For a full list of all lints with their description and examples, please refer to Clippy's lint list. The two most important allow-by-default groups are described below:

clippy::pedantic

The first group is the pedantic group. This group contains really opinionated lints, that may have some intentional false positives in order to prevent false negatives. So while this group is ready to be used in production, you can expect to sprinkle multiple #[allow(..)]s in your code. If you find any false positives, you're still welcome to report them to us for future improvements.

FYI: Clippy uses the whole group to lint itself.

clippy::restriction

The second group is the restriction group. This group contains lints that "restrict" the language in some way. For example the clippy::unwrap lint from this group won't allow you to use .unwrap() in your code. You may want to look through the lints in this group and enable the ones that fit your need.

Note: You shouldn't enable the whole lint group, but cherry-pick lints from this group. Some lints in this group will even contradict other Clippy lints!

Too many lints

The most opinionated warn-by-default group of Clippy is the clippy::style group. Some people prefer to disable this group completely and then cherry-pick some lints they like from this group. The same is of course possible with every other of Clippy's lint groups.

Note: We try to keep the warn-by-default groups free from false positives (FP). If you find that a lint wrongly triggers, please report it in an issue (if there isn't an issue for that FP already)

Source Code

You can configure lint levels in source code the same way you can configure rustc lints:

#![allow(clippy::style)]

#[warn(clippy::double_neg)]
fn main() {
    let x = 1;
    let y = --x;
    //      ^^ warning: double negation
}

Automatically applying Clippy suggestions

Clippy can automatically apply some lint suggestions, just like the compiler. Note that --fix implies --all-targets, so it can fix as much code as it can.

cargo clippy --fix

Workspaces

All the usual workspace options should work with Clippy. For example the following command will run Clippy on the example crate in your workspace:

cargo clippy -p example

As with cargo check, this includes dependencies that are members of the workspace, like path dependencies. If you want to run Clippy only on the given crate, use the --no-deps option like this:

cargo clippy -p example -- --no-deps

Using Clippy without cargo: clippy-driver

Clippy can also be used in projects that do not use cargo. To do so, run clippy-driver with the same arguments you use for rustc. For example:

clippy-driver --edition 2018 -Cpanic=abort foo.rs

Note: clippy-driver is designed for running Clippy and should not be used as a general replacement for rustc. clippy-driver may produce artifacts that are not optimized as expected, for example.