How to contribute to PMD

First off, thanks for taking the time to contribute!

Pull requests

Please create your pull request against the master 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.

Bug reports

We used to use Sourceforge for bug tracking, but we are in the process of moving to github issues.

Old bugs are still available at https://sourceforge.net/p/pmd/bugs/.
Please report new bugs at https://github.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)

Documentation

There is some documentation available under https://pmd.github.io. Feel free to create a bug report if documentation is missing, incomplete or outdated.

The documentation is generated as a maven site, the source is available at: https://github.com/pmd/pmd/tree/master/src/site

Questions

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

The mailing list: pmd-devel
The discussion forums on sourceforge: https://sourceforge.net/p/pmd/discussion/
On StackOverflow: Make sure, to tag your question with "pmd".

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.

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