Building PMD with Netbeans | PMD Source Code Analyzer

Table of Contents

Import PMD Project

This needs to be done only once.

Install Apache Netbeans
Select File > Open Project… and choose the already checked out PMD source folder.
After a while, you should see under “Projects > PMD > Modules” all the modules. You can then open individual projects.

Running Unit Tests

Right-click on an open project, e.g. “PMD Java” and select “Test”. Netbeans then uses maven to execute the unit tests.
You can also run individual test classes.

Note: When executing tests, NetBeans actually calls Maven with surefire:test goal.

Running / Debugging PMD

Open the project “PMD CLI” and navigate to the class PmdCli.
Right-click on the class and select “Run File”. This runs PMD without any commands and just shows the help text.
In the output window at the bottom, click the double yellow arrow to open a “Run Maven” dialog and configure the arguments as e.g. exec.appArgs=check --help. Also change the classpath scope to exec.classpathScope=test.
In the “Run Maven” dialog, use the “Add >” button to add the debug configuration - then you can set breakpoints and run in the debugger. Unfortunately, this doesn’t work correctly, as Netbeans seems to start maven with the debugger instead of the executed java app. Therefore, instead of using jpda.listen=maven, we use exec.vmArgs=-agentlib:jdwp=transport=dt_socket,server=y,suspend=y,address=8000. This will stop PMD at the beginning to wait for the debugger. Then you can run in NetBeans “Debug > Attach Debugger…”, select “SocketAttach” using port “8000”.

Note:

If you want to run/debug other PMD modules than PMD Java, then you need to add additional dependencies to PMD CLI as scope test, e.g.

        <dependency>
            <groupId>net.sourceforge.pmd</groupId>
            <artifactId>pmd-apex</artifactId>
            <version>${project.version}</version>
            <scope>test</scope>
        </dependency>

Formatter configuration

Import the code style settings (formatter) so that it conforms with our Checkstyle config. To do that, go to Tool > Options and the use the button “Import…” and the bottom. Choose the file netbeans/formatting.zip from the build-tools repository.

Running the Designer

The designer lives in a separate repository, that you’ll need to fork and clone first: Designer repository

git clone git@github.com:your_user_name/pmd-designer.git

Select File > Open Project… and choose the pmd-designer source folder.
Navigate to class DesignerStarter
Select “Run File”
In the output window at the bottom, click the double yellow arrow to open a “Run Maven” dialog and configure the profiles: “running,with-javafx”

Known Issues

There is no Kotlin support for Netbeans. As some parts of PMD use Kotlin, there is no IDE support. See kotlin-netbeans#122.
There is no recent checkstyle plugin for Netbeans.
When executing tests, the test results are not always recognized by Netbeans. It sometimes says no tests executed although surefire did run tests.

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