flycheck cannot enable python-flake8 configuration file not found

Question

I'm trying to set up flycheck to run flake8 on my python files. I'm using pipenv so I set up flycheck-python-flake8-executable for my buffer to point to the virtual environment version of flake8 and it seems to be detected. However it refuses to enable the checker. Running flycheck-verify-setup gives me

  python-flake8 (disabled)
    - may enable:         yes
    - executable:         Found at /Users/gmauer/.local/share/virtualenvs/project-name-qFaGhtMo/bin/flake8
    - configuration file: Not found

So I try to enable it with flycheck-disable-checker and...nothing, nothing output to messages, no errors, same verify-checker output.

I thought that maybe it has to do with the fact that it can't find a configuration file but I have a valid .flake8 file in both my user root and in my project so I have no clue why its not detecting it.

[flake8]
exclude = .git,__pycache__,docs/source/conf.py,old,build,dist,node_modules,instance

I can run it just fine from eshell.

What could be wrong? What else do I do to debug?

Answer 1

You can set the path to your flake8 configuration with: (setq flycheck-flake8rc "/path/to/your/flake8-config-file")

As for enabling there are different ways of doing it I prefer to use an add-hook like so: (add-hook 'python-mode-hook 'flycheck-mode)

You can also set it up globally with: (add-hook 'after-init-hook #'global-flycheck-mode).