We have multiple python projects over multiple (private) repos in github and I would like all of them to share a standard, organization-wide style (eg. line length, any explicit select/ignore settings, etc.). Each individual project could have a configuration that contained project-specific settings. This would normally be additional ignore settings (eg. to gradually transition a project to our style rule by rule). Ideally, a developer should be able to run a single command to do style checks.

I'm looking for guidance about how to go about doing this with flake8. What I was thinking was that we'd have a private python package that brings in flake8 plus any plugin packages and custom extensions (similar to hacking); it would also bring in the global configuration file. In this way, projects could simply add, say, <org>-flake8 to their requirements.txt file. I'm pretty sure that we'd need a wrapper script to handle the global configuration. The question is more about how to specify the global config correctly.

flake8's doesn't seem to have the notion of a global base configuration; the closest thing is the user configuration, but that is layered on top of whatever project configuration there is. The "--config" argument isn't useful as that forces a single configuration file. "--append-config" is a possibility. A wrapper that runs flake8 with --append-config to layer first global + local could work but local settings would have to be in a fixed file. We'd layer local-global-local. That's sort of ok, but would lead to surprising results if a dev put settings in say "setup.cfg" and the wrapper always tried ".flake8" (though we could minimize such surprises by specifying all known project file names..).

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