How to contribute to PMD
Table of Contents

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute!

Please note that this project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By participating in this project you agree to abide by its terms. You can find the code of conduct in the file code_of_conduct.md.

Getting started

You can find a lot of detailed information on this page and in the related pages:

Here we’ll try to provide a concise overview.

Pull requests

  • Pull requests are welcomed. If the task is a bit bigger (say it touches more than 5 files), it might make sense to create an issue first to discuss the intended change.

  • Please create your pull request against the main branch. We will rebase/merge it to the maintenance branches, if necessary.

  • We are using Checkstyle to enforce a common code style. The check is integrated into the default build - so, make sure, you can build PMD without errors.
    See code style for more info.

  • Your pull request will be built automatically. If the build was successful, our PMD Regression Tester, which runs PMD against a couple of test projects and creates a report with the found new violations (or removed violations). This helps to avoid accidentally introducing false positives or negatives.

Bug reports

We use the issue tracker on . Please report new bugs at https://.com/pmd/pmd/issues.

When filing a bug report, please provide as much information as possible, so that we can reproduce the issue:

  • The name of the rule, that is buggy
  • A code snippet, which triggers a false positive/negative or crash
  • How do you execute PMD? (command line, ant, maven, gradle, other)

Reporting Security Issues

See SECURITY.md

Documentation

There is some documentation available under https://docs.pmd-code.org/latest. Feel free to create a bug report if documentation is missing, incomplete or outdated. See Bug reports.

The documentation is generated as a Jekyll site, the source is available in the subfolder docs or at: https://.com/pmd/pmd/tree/main/docs. You can find build instructions there. See also writing documentation for detailed information.

PMD Designer

The rule designer is developed over at pmd/pmd-designer. Please refer to the specific contributor documentation if your issue, feature request or PR touches the designer.

Questions

There are various channels, on which you can ask questions:

Code Style

PMD uses Checkstyle to enforce a common code style.

See pmd-checkstyle-config.xml for the configuration and the eclipse configuration files that can be imported into a fresh workspace.

Add yourself as contributor

We use All Contributors - all our contributors are listed on the page Credits.

To add yourself to the table of contributors, follow the bot usage instructions ;).

Or use the CLI:

  1. Install the CLI: npm i (in PMD’s top level directory)
  2. Add yourself: npx all-contributors add <username> <contribution>

Where username is your username and contribution is a ,-separated list of contributions. See Emoji Key for a list of valid types. Common types are: “code”, “doc”, “bug”, “blog”, “talk”, “test”, “tutorial”.

See also cli documentation

Tags: devdocs