Checking your python code format on Azure Pipelines

Hello ! I’m Xavier Jouvenot and in this small post, I am going to explain how to automatically check if your python code is well formatted with Azure Pipelines.

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Problematic

If you are not convinced that you should format you code, I really encourage you to go look at the previous article I did on Formatting and Automation, where I go in detail on why you should definitively format your code, and do it in a automatic way, to make your code more readable and make your team more productive since they won’t have to spend time arguing about Spaces VS Tabs.

Solution

The short answer, for the people who don’t want to read through the entire article (I know you do that! I do it too😆) is to insert the following steps in your Azure Pipelines process:

- script: |
    pip3 install black
displayName: Installs the latest version of black
- script: |
    black --check .
displayName: Checks if the python scripts are formatted properly with black

If you have my previous article about “Formatting Python — Why and How !”, you may already know about about the tool named black. For those who don’t know, this is a code formatter, described by its authors as follow: > Black…