Lightweight Eclipse Plugin for Quality Assurance Tools

The offical Eclipse plugins for PMD and Checkstyle work great...as long as you do not want to add custom rules or checks, respectively. For this purpose, you need to implement an Eclipse Plugin Fragment including the new rules/checks. This causes an unnecessarily high implementation effort and hampers the setup of a common, uniform QA configuration for each of your team members.

Hence, I implemented a new plugin, which covers all of the matured QA tools, and allows an easy integration of custom rules/checks via a config file. Eclipse Plugin Fragments are not necessary. You can keep your QA config files and use them for your build tool, your continuous integration infrastructure, and within Eclipse.

• Done: PMD, Checkstyle
• In progress: Spotbugs (formerly Findbugs)

• Planned: nothing else, so far.

  See our associated milestones.

Usage

The plugin provides for each QA tool:

• a command entry in the context menu (a.k.a. right-click menu) to execute the tool (example: "Run PMD")

  

• a view to display the issues detected by the tool. This view needs to be opened manually via

  "Window -> Show View -> Other..."

  A double-click on a violation in this view opens the corresponding file in the editor and jumps to the associated line of code.

  

• a property page for each project (example: "PMD Settings"). This page allows to configure the tool.

  

Configuration

The plugin expects a dedicated "prefs" file in the directory ".settings" of the Eclipse project, you like to check for issues. This file is created automatically if you press the "apply" button on the corresponding property page.

The property page allows

• to enable/disable the tool for the project,
• to define the path to the tool's xml configuration file, and
• to define the path(s) to the jar file(s) containing your custom rules/checks.

The "prefs" file is intended to be uploaded to your repository to share your configuration with your team.

IMPORTANT The version of the API used for your custom rules/checks must be compatible with the version of the tool included in this Eclipse plugin.

• The version of PMD included in this plugin can be found here.
• The version of Checkstyle included in this plugin can be found here

Install

• via Eclipse Updatesite:
  • Snapshot version: https://maui.se.informatik.uni-kiel.de/repo/qa/snapshot/
  • Release version: not yet available

Build

• via Maven 3.6 or above

  mvn clean install -s settings.xml -DupdateSiteUrl=URL -Dkeystore=KEY

• You need to specify two variable to publish the packages
  • URL = an sftp url, e.g., sftp://user@host/repo
  • KEY = filename of a private key used to login on the ssh server hosting your repo

Local Development

1. Build qa.eclipse.plugin via mvn clean package
2. Copy the three build artifacts from
   • qa-eclipse-plugin/bundles/XXX/target/qa.eclipse.plugin.bundles.XXX-1.0.0-SNAPSHOT.jar (where XXX is supposed to be common, checkstyle, and pmd) to your Eclipse installation folder:
   • Path/To/Eclipse/dropins/plugins (You might need to create the plugins folder
3. Start Eclipse via the clean flag, e.g., ./eclipse -clean on Linux. The clean flag is used to clean Eclipse's plugin cache.
4. In Eclipse, check if the plugin is installed. Check if Window -> Show View -> Other... -> Quality Assurance is available.