mllint is designed to be used both on your personal computer as well as on CI systems. So, open a terminal in your project folder and run one of the following commands, or add it to your project’s CI script.
To run mllint on the project in the current folder, simply run:
mllint
To run mllint on a project in another folder, simply run:
mllint path/to/my-ml-project
mllint will analyse your project and create a Markdown-formatted report of its analysis. By default, this will be pretty printed to your terminal.
If you instead prefer to export the raw Markdown text to a file, which may be particularly useful when running on CI, the --output or -o flag and provide a filename. mllint does not overwrite the destination file if it already exists, unless --force or -f is used. For example:
mllint --output report.md
Using - (a dash) as the filename prints the raw Markdown directly to your terminal:
mllint -o -
In CI scripts, such raw markdown output (whether as a file or printed to the standard output) can be used to e.g. make comments on pull/merge requests or create Wiki pages on your repository.
See this example-report.md for an example of a report that mllint generates, or explore those generated for the example projects.
Of course, feel free to explore mllint help for more information about its commands and to discover additional flags that can be used.
Linters, Categories and Rules
mllint analyses your project by evaluating several categories of linting rules. Each category, as well as each rule, has a ‘slug’, i.e., a lowercased piece of text with dashes or slashes for spaces, e.g., code-quality/pylint/no-issues. This slug identifies a rule and is often (if not always) displayed next to the category or rule that it references.
To list all available (implemented) categories and linting rules, run:
mllint list all
To list all enabled linting rules, run (optionally providing the path to the project’s folder):
mllint list enabled
By default, all of mllint’s rules are enabled. See Configuration to learn how to selectively disable certain rules.
To learn more about a certain rule or category, use mllint describe along with the slug of the category or rule:
# Describe the Version Control category. This will also list the rules that it checks.
mllint describe version-control
# Use the exact slug of a rule to describe one rule,
# e.g., the rule on DVC usage in the Version Control category
mllint describe version-control/data/dvc
# Use a partial slug to describe all rules whose slug starts with this snippet,
# e.g., all rules about version controlling data
mllint describe version-control/data
Custom linting rules
It is also possible to define your own custom linting rules by implementing a script or program that mllint will run while performing its analysis.
These custom rules need to be defined in mllint’s configuration. For more information on how to do this, see mllint describe custom.