@codacy/tools-pmd-6

Table of Contents

• Overview
• Updating patterns
• Updating the PMD version
• Development
• Notes for maintainers

Overview

PMD 6 adapter for Codacy analysis. PMD is a multi-language static analysis tool that finds common programming flaws such as unused variables, empty catch blocks, and unnecessary object creation. This adapter wraps PMD 6.55.0 (the final 6.x release) as a CLI child process.

Updating patterns

# Re-fetch pattern metadata from the Codacy API
pnpm prefetch

# Commit the result
git add src/patterns.json

Updating the PMD version

PMD 6.55.0 is the final PMD 6.x release. No further updates will be made to PMD 6. For PMD 7.x, see the pmd-7 adapter package.

Development

pnpm build    # Build with tsup
pnpm test     # Run tests

To run integration tests, ensure Java 8+ and the PMD 6 distribution are available on your PATH. Tests requiring the real binary are automatically skipped when PMD is not present.

Notes for maintainers

• Preset mappings (src/pattern-mappings.json): the JUnit and EJB rules are gated. The JUnit4* rules go to junit (the Maven junit:junit artifact, i.e. JUnit 3/4) and JUnit5TestShouldBePackagePrivate to junit-5 (junit-jupiter), so a JUnit-5-only project no longer gets JUnit-4 annotation advice. The version-agnostic ones (JUnitAssertions*, JUnitTest*, DetachedTestCase, TestClassWithoutTestCases) are claimed by both keys, which filterAutoPatterns treats as an OR. Three were default-on (JUnitSpelling, JUnitStaticSuite, JUnitTestsShouldIncludeAssert) and now stay out of a Java repo with no test framework. The five session-bean naming rules plus StaticEJBFieldShouldBeFinal gate on jakarta-ee, matched from the EJB/Jakarta EE API jars under every name they have shipped as.

  Detection had to learn spring-boot-starter-test (which pulls JUnit 5 transitively and is the only test declaration most Spring projects have), the junit-jupiter-/junit-platform- per-role artifacts, and Gradle's testRuntimeOnly verb — without those, gating these default-on rules would have lost them for every Spring Boot repo.

• CLI entry point differs from PMD 7: PMD 6 uses bin/run.sh pmd ... (with pmd as the first argument to run.sh), while PMD 7 uses bin/pmd check ....

• Fail flag syntax: PMD 6 uses --fail-on-violation false (flag + value), while PMD 7 uses --no-fail-on-violation (single flag).

• No progress bar flag: PMD 6 does not support --no-progress.

• Filtered extensions: .jsx, .jsm, and .vue files are filtered out before analysis because PMD 6's JavaScript engine (Mozilla Rhino) cannot parse them.

• Language terse names: PMD 6 uses vm for Velocity and vf for VisualForce (PMD 7 uses velocity and visualforce). This affects pattern ID matching.

• No Kotlin/Swift/TypeScript: These languages were added in PMD 7 only.

• JSON output: The processingErrors and configurationErrors fields may be absent in PMD 6's JSON output (they are optional in the adapter's type definition).