net.sourceforge.pmd:pmd-ui

PMD Rule Designer

The Rule Designer is a graphical tool that helps PMD users develop their custom rules. Main features:

• AST inspection: inspect AST structure for any language, including XPath attributes
• XPath rule design: integrated XPath editor, and rule metadata editor
• Rule test edition: create or edit rule test files for the PMD testing framework

Installation

The designer is part of PMD's binary distributions. To install a distribution, see the documentation page about installing PMD.

The app needs JRE 1.8 or above to run. Be aware that on JRE 11+, the JavaFX distribution should be installed separately. Visit the download page to download a distribution, extract it, and set the JAVAFX_HOME environment variable.

If the bin directory of your PMD distribution is on your shell's path, then you can launch the app with

• pmd designer on Linux/ OSX
• pmd.bat designer on Windows

Alternatively, you can launch the program "from source" with Maven.

• $ ./mvnw -Prunning exec:java will launch the program after compiling it, using the JavaFX distribution of your system
• $ ./mvnw -Prunning,with-javafx exec:java will also add JavaFX dependencies on your classpath. You can change the version of those dependencies with eg -Dopenjfx.version 13 for OpenJFX 13. See the list of available versions here.

Updating

The latest version of the designer currently works with PMD 7.0.0-rc1 and above. You can simply replace pmd-ui-7.X.Y.jar with the latest build in the installation folder of your PMD distribution.

Usage

Usage documentation is on the website

Building from source/ contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions to build the project from source and setup your IDE.

Building a runnable JAR

You can package a runnable jar containing the PMD dependencies with maven. For now the only option is to build a jar that contains pmd-core and pmd-java:

mvn clean package -Dfat-java -Dpmd.core.version=7.0.0-SNAPSHOT

The pmd.core.version property selects the version of pmd-core and pmd-java that will be included. The built jar can then be found in your target directory. Such a jar cannot be used in a PMD distribution and must be used in a standalone fashion, otherwise classpath conflicts may arise.

You should never run the install goal with the -Dfat-java property! This would install the fat jar in your local repo and may cause dependency conflicts.