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

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.