Building PMD with VS Code | PMD Source Code Analyzer

Table of Contents

Warning: It is not recommend to use VS Code for developing. See Known Issues below.

Import PMD Project

This needs to be done only once.

Install Visual Studio Code
Select File > Open Folder… and choose the already checked out PMD source folder.
Install Extension Pack for Java
After a while, you should see in the Explorer under “Java Projects” all the modules. This is the “Java Project Explorer”.

Running Unit Tests

Navigate to a test class and select “Run Test”.

Note:

You’ll get the notification “Build failed”. You can try to ignore the error and continue, but you might end up with “Unresolved compilation problems”. See below under “Known Issues” for more information.

PMD currently is still built for Java 8 and the VS Code plugin chooses a Java 8 runtime. For building however, we use Java 11 and also the tests require some Java 11 features. You might need to override the java version manually: Ctlr+Shift+P and enter “configure java runtime”. There you can override the java version for each project/module.

Running / Debugging PMD

Navigate to the class PmdCli.
Click on the “Run” link just above the main-method.

To customize the options, open the “Run and Debug” window (Ctlr+Shift+D) and click the link “create a launch.json file”. Add the following configuration:

      {
          "type": "java",
          "name": "PmdCli with args",
          "request": "launch",
          "mainClass": "net.sourceforge.pmd.cli.PmdCli",
          "projectName": "pmd-cli",
          "args": "check --help",
          "classPaths": ["$Test"]
      },

Select the run configuration “PmdCli with args” in the dropdown and use File > Start Debugging or File > Run Without Debugging.

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

Select File > Preferences > Settings and search for “java format settings”. Then enter the full path to eclipse/pmd-eclipse-code-formatter.xml 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 > Add Folder to Workspace… and choose the pmd-designer source folder.
Wait until the project has been successfully imported.
Navigate to class DesignerStarter and run it.

Known Issues

Some Java files in PMD cannot be compiled with VS Code. The Java plugin for VS Code is based on the Eclipse Java Plugin which uses an own compiler (ejc). This compiler has some subtle differences when dealing with type inference and generics and sometimes cannot compile PMD source code correctly. PMD source is valid, it compiles with openjdk, but just not with ecj.

You’ll get the notification “Build failed”. You can try to ignore the error and continue, but you might end up with “Unresolved compilation problems”.
There is no Kotlin support. As some parts of PMD use Kotlin, there is no IDE support.
There is no recent checkstyle plugin for Netbeans.

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