yuokada/createyourowncheckstylecheck

How to write a custom CheckStyle check and incorporate it into your Maven project

CreateYourOwnCheckStyleCheck

Contains two projects

• TestProject contains the poorly written Java code that will have checkstyle ran on it

• BlundellCheckstyle contains the custom checkstyle checks that have been written

How it works

• TestProject uses the maven-checkstyle-plugin
• the maven-checkstyle-plugin has a dependency on BlundellCheckStyle
• BlundellCheckstyle is where we create the custom checks
• the maven-checkstyle-plugin then uses a checkstyle-configuration.xml file to declare what checks we want checkstyle to run
• within checkstyle-configuration.xml we declare our custom checks from BlundellCheckStyle

How to run checkstyle

• from a Terminal
• run mvn install
• go into the TestProject folder
• run mvn checkstyle:checkstyle
• open up target/site/checkstyle.html to see style errors

Current Limitations

• in checkstyle-configuration.xml we have to use the full package of the check com.blundell.checks.AntiHungarian
• this can be fixed by declaring a checkstyle-packages.xml this currently doesn't work

checkstyle-packages.xml would looks something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE checkstyle-packages PUBLIC
  "-//Puppy Crawl//DTD Package Names 1.0//EN"
  "http://www.puppycrawl.com/dtds/packages_1_0.dtd">

<checkstyle-packages>
  <package name="com.blundell.checks">
</checkstyle-packages>

and you would add it to the maven-checkstyle-plugin declaration

// There are multiple ways to try this, I haven't found one that works
// so I do not want to document it here

then your checkstyle-configuration.xml would not need the package:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE module PUBLIC
    "-//Puppy Crawl//DTD Check Configuration 1.2//EN"
    "http://www.puppycrawl.com/dtds/configuration_1_2.dtd">

<module name="Checker">
  <module name="TreeWalker">
    <!-- Blundell specific checks -->
    <module name="AntiHungarian" />
  </module>
</module>