pmd/CONTRIBUTING.md

How to contribute to PMD

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.

NB: 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.

Pull requests

• 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.

Bug reports

We use the issue tracker on Github. 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://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 Feel free to create a bug report if documentation is missing, incomplete or outdated.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 at: https://github.com/pmd/pmd/tree/main/docs. You can find build instructions there. For more on contributing documentation check https://docs.pmd-code.org/latest/pmd_devdocs_writing_documentation.html

Questions

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

• On StackOverflow: Make sure, to tag your question with "pmd".

• Create a new discussion for your question at https://github.com/pmd/pmd/discussions.

• Ask your question in our Gitter room.

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.

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 GitHub 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