Does flake8 require any installation of my Python project's dependencies?

Question

Is Flake8 a pure static code analyser or should I run pip install -r requirements.txt first?

Or, is there any use case where Flake8 can use the installed dependencies?

Answer 1

flake8 by itself (with the default plugin set) is a purely static linter and does not rely on your installed application dependencies

there are some plugins which will require dynamic analysis such as flake8-mypy or flake8-isort

(disclaimer: I am the current maintainer of flake8)