Cpplint is a command-line tool to check C/C++ files for style issues according to Google's C++ style guide.

Cpplint used to be developed and maintained by Google Inc. at google/styleguide. Nowadays, Google is no longer maintaining the public version of cpplint, and pretty much everything in their repo's PRs and issues about cpplint have gone unimplemented.

This fork aims to update cpplint to modern specifications, and be (somewhat) more open to adding fixes and features to make cpplint usable in wider contexts.

Use your preferred tool to install the cpplint package from PyPI. To install cpplint as a uv tool, run:

$ uv tool install cpplint

cpplint can also be run as a pre-commit hook by adding this to .pre-commit-config.yaml:

- repo: https://github.com/cpplint/cpplint
  rev:  # cpplint version number or git tag
  hooks:
    - id: cpplint
      args:
        - --filter=-whitespace/line_length,-whitespace/parens

cpplint also ships out of the box in MegaLinter, an open-source linter aggregator for CI (see its cpplint documentation).

$ cpplint [OPTIONS] files

For full usage instructions, run:

$ cpplint --help

• Python 3 compatibility
• More default file extensions
• Continuous integration on GitHub
• Excluding files via --exclude
• Customizable file extensions via --extensions
• Recursive file discovery via --recursive
• Skip entire blocks of code via // NOLINTBEGIN and // NOLINTEND
• Support for more modern C++ features
• Support #pragma once as an alternative to header include guards
• ... and quite a bit more

Thanks to Google Inc. for open-sourcing their in-house tool.

Thanks to our contributors.

• @aaronliu0130
• @cclauss
• @jayvdb

• @tkruse
• @mattyclarkson
• @theandrewdavis