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

• run.sh designer on Linux/ OSX
• designer.bat 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 6.27.0 and above. You can simply replace pmd-ui-6.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.