pylint-restricted-imports is Pylint plugin for restricting what imports are allowed in specific module trees. Want to prevent django from being imported in a flask app? This plugin is for you!

Ensure pylint-restricted-imports is installed and on your path, and then run pylint using pylint-restricted-imports as a plugin:

pip install pylint-restricted-imports
pylint --load-plugins pylint_restricted_imports [..your module..]

Before the plugin will do anything, it needs configuring. You can use pylint to generate the default configuration:

pylint --load-plugins pylint_restricted_imports --generate-rcfile

You will end up with a block similar to below:

[RESTRICTED-IMPORT]
# Colon/semicolon-delimited sets of names that determine what modules are
# allowed to be imported from another module
restricted-imports=

# Check restricted imports recursively
restricted-import-recurse=no

restricted-imports is a csv list of module/restricted imports. The format is <module>:<restricted module>;.... For example, the following would prevent restricted1 and restricted2 from being imported in module1 and restricted3 and restricted4 from being imported in module2:

module1:restricted1;restricted2,module2:fordibben3;restricted4

You can enable the transitive detection of restricted imports, however this takes a lot more compute.

For example, if have the following files:

# flask_app.py
import flask
import common_utils

# common_utils.py
import django

If flask_app is not allowed to import django, the transitive checker would throw an error because importing common_utils would cause django to be imported, which is restricted.