Python Practices #

Work in Progress - looking for help!

Naming conventions - PEP8 #

Using well known conventions makes easier for other developers to understand your code and maintain it in the future.

• PEP 8 – Style Guide for Python Code

Namespacing #

Use proper namespacing to avoid conflicts with existing packages. It is preferred to put any FreeCAD code in a sub-module of the freecad base namespace.

• Python Modules Documentation
• Python Packaging Namespace Packages Guide

Tooling #

Code formatting and linting #

• Ruff: (modern and fast)

  Ruff Documentation

• Black

  Black Documentation

  Main FreeCAD repo uses black with --linelength=100 in the pre-commit hook, so if you are submitting code to main, take that into account.

Project management #

The modern tooling for python is uv, it replaces pip and manage dependencies, project metadata, virtual environments, etc… and it is 10x faster than pip.

uv Documentation

Typing #

Type hints makes the code safer and more easy to maintain and refactor.

• typing cheat sheet

There are many static type checkers:

• mypy (maybe the most common)
• pyright (Microsoft)
• ty (New and fast)

Python versions #

Current supported python versions in FreeCAD are 3.10+, but some addons may not work with latest python versions.