Should DRF consider migrating from Flake8 + isort to Ruff?

[p-r-a-v-i-n]

Hi everyone,

I wanted to open a small discussion around the idea of moving Django REST Framework’s linting setup to Ruff, mainly to understand if maintainers think this direction makes sense.

Right now DRF uses a combination of:

• Flake8 (with multiple plugins)
• isort
• pyupgrade
• several pre-commit hooks

Ruff can cover most of these in a single tool, which could simplify configuration and speed up linting in both local development and CI.

This is not a proposal for a PR yet, especially because a full migration would create a large diff, and I don’t want to do anything without maintainers agreeing on the idea first. At this point, I’m just trying to understand:

• Would the team be open to considering Ruff at some point?
• Are there concerns around the impact or the migration path?
• Is keeping the current Flake8-based setup preferred?

I’m happy to help or prepare a draft plan if the idea seems useful, but only if maintainers feel this is a direction worth exploring.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

[deronnax]

(I am not a maintainer)

Ruff can cover most of these in a single tool, which could simplify configuration and speed up linting in both local development and CI.

Usually I am not in favor of the "let's change tool X for Y because Y is the new shiny toy", but:

• Flake8 was good and served us well, but you need to add thousands of 100 lines plugins that all end being somewhat abandonned at a point in time (or just break). Also, the owner is very problematic in its interaction with the community, and stubbornly refusing to add features that have become the standards (like a pyproject.toml config). All and all, it starts to really show its age, and it will only worsen
• pyupgrade : this maintaince problems shows less, but pyupgrade is nonetheless exposed as well (many contributors PRs hastly closed without proper rationale)
• isort author blessed ruff

Given that replacing all these tools fur ruff is a few line diff PR with the right ruff options to conserve the current behavior, I would suggest to do it.
I am willing to do it if the maintainers greenligt the thing.

[browniebroke]

Yes, I like ruff and I moved my other projects to it. As you said, the main problem with migrating is the formatting part which would create a huge diff as DRF code style is a fair bit different from black/ruff style of formatting.