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

The designer is part of PMD's binary distributions. To install a distribution, see the documentation page about installing PMD.

The app needs either Oracle Java 8 (which includes JavaFX) or OpenJDK 11+ and a separately installed OpenJFX distribution. Visit JavaFX - Gluon to download an SDK 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

• pmd designer on Linux/ OSX
• pmd.bat designer on Windows

Alternatively, you can launch the program "from source" with Maven.

• $ ./mvnw -Prunning exec:java will launch the program after compiling it, using the JavaFX distribution of your system
• $ ./mvnw -Prunning,with-javafx exec:java will also add JavaFX dependencies on your classpath. You can change the version of those dependencies with eg -Dopenjfx.version=21.0.2 for OpenJFX 21. See the list of available versions here.

The latest version of the designer currently works with PMD 7.0.0 and above. You can simply replace pmd-designer-7.X.Y.jar with the latest build in the installation folder of your PMD distribution.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for instructions to build the project from source and setup your IDE.

You can package a runnable jar containing the PMD dependencies with maven. For now the only option is to build a jar that contains pmd-core and pmd-java:

./mvnw clean package -Dfat-java -Dpmd.core.version=7.0.0-SNAPSHOT

The pmd.core.version property selects the version of pmd-core and pmd-java that will be included. The built jar can then be found in your target directory. Such a jar cannot be used in a PMD distribution and must be used in a standalone fashion, otherwise classpath conflicts may arise. You can additionally enable the profile with-javafx to include openjfx as well.

You should never run the install goal with the -Dfat-java property! This would install the fat jar in your local repo and may cause dependency conflicts.