checkstyle Command Line

Description

This document describes how to run checkstyle using the command line tool. The latest version of checkstyle can be found at http://www.puppycrawl.com/checkstyle. This command line tool is included in the checkstyle distribution.

Installation

The easiest way is to include checkstyle-all-1.0.jar in the classpath. This contains all the classes required to run checkstyle. Alternatively, you must include the following in the classpath:

  1. checkstyle-1.0.jar
  2. ANTLR 2.7.1 classes. antlr.jar is included in the distribution.
  3. Jakarta Regexp 1.2 classes. jakarta-regexp-1.2.jar is included in the distribution.

Usage

The command line usage is:

  java -D<property>=<value> com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main file...

checkstyle will process the specified files and report errors to standard error. The default behaviour of checkstyle can be changed by setting system properties using the -D<property>=<value> arguments to java. The following table describes what properties can be set:

Property Description
checkstyle.allow.tabs Indicates whether to allow tabs. Defaults to "no".
checkstyle.allow.protected Indicates whether to allow protected data. Defaults to "no".
checkstyle.allow.noauthor Indicates whether to allow no @author tag to be defined for class and interface Javadoc comments. Defaults to "no".
checkstyle.maxlinelen Specifies the maximum line length. Default value is defined here.
checkstyle.pattern.member Specifies the regular expression to match against member variables. Default value is defined here.
checkstyle.pattern.parameter Specifies the regular expression to match against parameters. Default value is defined here.
checkstyle.pattern.const Specifies the regular expression to match against static/final variables. Default value is defined here.
checkstyle.pattern.static Specifies the regular expression to match against static variables. Default value is defined here.
checkstyle.pattern.type Specifies the regular expression to match against type names. Default value is defined here.
checkstyle.header.file Specifies the file containing the header lines. Default is to not check.
checkstyle.header.ignoreline Specifies the line in the header to ignore when comparing. Default it to not ignore any line.

Examples

Run checkstyle on a file

  java  com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main  Check.java

Run checkstyle on a file and allow tabs

  java  -Dcheckstyle.allow.tabs=yes  com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main Check.java

Run checkstyle on a file and disable pattern matching

  java  -Dcheckstyle.pattern.parameter=. \
        -Dcheckstyle.pattern.static=. \
        -Dcheckstyle.pattern.const=. \
        -Dcheckstyle.pattern.member=. \
        com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main Check.java

Copyright © 2001 Oliver Burn. All rights Reserved.
$Id: cmdline.html,v 1.4 2001/02/15 00:23:48 oburn Exp $