How to add Findbugs and Checkstyle plugins to your maven3 build

Findbugs and Checkstyle are two awesome tools that help to maintain the quality of your code discovering anti patterns or bad smells.Normally we can run those two tools with the help of IDE but there are possibilities that developers may be ignorant about them.So how about adding them to the normal maven build so developers are forced to correct their mistakes. There are different level of sympathetic levels that you can have  with this integration.You can break the build if you find any Findbug violations and use SVN blame to find who broke the build  . I am leaving that part to you and introduce basic integration of those essential power tools to Maven build system. I am using maven3 so all assumptions are based on that.

Adding Findbugs

You can find the maven plugin page here.[1]. Under the project Reports–> plugin documentation you can find all the configuration so that you can customize to your own requirements.

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<plugin>     <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>     <artifactId>findbugs-maven-plugin</artifactId>     <version>2.3.3</version>     <configuration>         <trace>false</trace>         <effort>Max</effort>         <threshold>Low</threshold>         <xmlOutput>true</xmlOutput>         <failOnError>false</failOnError>     </configuration>     <executions>         <execution>             <phase>verify</phase>             <goals>                 <goal>findbugs</goal>             </goals>         </execution>     </executions> </plugin> <plugin>

This will execute in verify phase before install phase. Since you need to verify your source code before compiling it is the most suitable phase to run.If you search you will find lot more resources how this can be adjusted easily so you can integrate this into report generation and add to the Maven site.

There is another cool hack that i have found in this.[2].This Groovy script will print all the lines and summary to your build log with line number .class name and message.

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<plugin>       <groupId>org.codehaus.groovy.maven</groupId>       <artifactId>gmaven-plugin</artifactId>       <version>1.0</version>       <executions>           <execution>               <phase>install</phase>               <goals>                   <goal>execute</goal>               </goals>               <configuration>                   <source>                       def file = new File("${project.build.directory}/findbugsXml.xml")                       if (!file.exists()) {                       log.warn("Findbugs XML report is absent: " + file.getPath())                       }                       def xml = new XmlParser().parse(file)                       def bugs = xml.BugInstance                       def total = bugs.size()                       if (total &gt; 0) {                       log.info("Total bugs: " + total)                       for (i in 0..total-1) {                       def bug = bugs[i]                       log.info("\n"+                       bug.LongMessage.text()                       + " " + bug.Class.'@classname'                       + " " + bug.Class.SourceLine.Message.text()                       +"\n")                       }                       }                   </source>               </configuration>           </execution>       </executions>   </plugin>

 Adding Checkstyle

This assumes that you have added a custom checkstyle configuration file(checkstyle.xml) to your projects path directly.If you do not specify a checkstyle configuration file configuration provided by  Sun Microsystems Definition is selected by default.

You can read all the available configuration details from plugin page[3].

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<plugin>      <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>      <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>      <version>2.8</version>      <configuration>          <consoleOutput>true</consoleOutput>          <configLocation>checkstyle.xml</configLocation>          <propertyExpansion>basedir=${project.basedir}</propertyExpansion>      </configuration>      <executions>          <execution>              <phase>verify</phase>              <goals>                  <goal>checkstyle</goal>              </goals>          </execution>      </executions>  </plugin>  <plugin>

If you have a multi modules insert this under plugin management and add the plugin entry to   child POMs.

[1]http://mojo.codehaus.org/findbugs-maven-plugin/

[2]http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1263409/maven-findbugscheck-output-summary-of-bugs

[3]http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-checkstyle-plugin/