##### Overview

- Download PMD 4.2.5
- What's new in PMD 4.2.5
- PMD in the news
- PMD-related products and books
- Best practices
- Future directions
- Similar projects
- Credits
- License
- What does 'PMD' mean?

##### Usage

- Installation
- Command line usage
- Ant task usage
- Maven plugin usage
- Mvn plugin usage
- IDE plugin usage
- Suppressing warnings
- Finding duplicated code
- JSP support

##### Customizing PMD

- Compiling PMD
- How to write a rule
- Writing XPath rules
- How to make a rule set
- How it works
- Rule guidelines

##### For example

- Run PMD on a Sourceforge project

##### Rule Sets

- Index
- Android
- Basic
- Braces
- Code Size
- Clone
- Controversial
- Coupling
- Design
- Finalizers
- Import Statements
- J2EE
- Javabeans
- JUnit Tests
- Logging (Java)
- Logging (Jakarta)
- Migrating
- Naming
- Optimizations
- Strict Exceptions
- Strings
- Sun Security
- Unused Code
- Java Server Pages
- Java Server Faces

##### Project Documentation

- About
- Project Info
- Project Reports
- Development Process

##### Legend

- External Link
- Opens in a new window

## Running the pmd plugin

### report

To include the mvn report in the project reports section add the following lines under the reports element in your pom.xml:

    <project>
      ...
      <reporting>
        <plugins>
          <plugin>
            <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
            <artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId>
          </plugin>
        </plugins>
      </reporting>
      ...
    </project>

This will add an entry to the 'project reports' section with the PMD report.

### manual

To run PMD on a Maven project without adding it as a report, simply run

    mvn pmd:pmd

The PMD plugin writes the report in XML which will then be formatted into more readable HTML.

## Customization

### Changing rulesets

To specify a ruleset, simply edit the previous configuration:

    <reporting>
    	<plugins>
    		<plugin>
    			<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    			<artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId>
    			<configuration>
    				<rulesets>
    					<ruleset>/rulesets/braces.xml</ruleset>
    					<ruleset>/rulesets/naming.xml</ruleset>
    					<ruleset>d:\rulesets\strings.xml</ruleset>
    					<ruleset>http://localhost/design.xml</ruleset>
    				</rulesets>
    			</configuration>
    		</plugin>
    	</plugins>
    </reporting>

The value of the 'ruleset' value can either be a relative address, an absolute address or even an url.

A clean strategy for customizing which rules to use for a project is to write a ruleset file. In this file you can define which rules to use, add custom rules, and customizing which rules to include/exclude from official rulesets. More information on writing a ruleset can be found here. Note that if you include other rulesets in your own rulesets, you have to be sure that the plugin will be able to resolve those other ruleset references.

### Other configurations

The Maven 2 PMD plugin allows you to configure CPD, targetJDK, and the use of XRef to link the report to html source files, and the file encoding:

    <plugin>
    	<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
    	<artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId>
    	<configuration>
    		<linkXref>true</linkXref>
    		<sourceEncoding>ISO-8859-1</sourceEncoding>
    		<minimumTokens>30</minimumTokens>
    		<targetJdk>1.4</targetJdk>
    	</configuration>
    </plugin>

## Reference

For more data, please see the well documented PMD plugin project page here: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-pmd-plugin/index.html