Apache Maven Checkstyle Plugin – Plugin Documentation

Plugin Documentation

This report describes goals, parameters details, requirements and sample usage of this plugin.

Goals

Goals available for this plugin:

Goal	Report?	Description
checkstyle:check	No	Performs Checkstyle analysis and outputs violations or a count of violations to the console, potentially failing the build. It can also be configured to re-use an earlier analysis.
checkstyle:checkstyle	Yes	A reporting task that performs Checkstyle analysis and generates an HTML report on any violations that Checkstyle finds.
checkstyle:checkstyle-aggregate	Yes	A reporting task that performs Checkstyle analysis and generates an aggregate HTML report on the violations that Checkstyle finds in a multi-module reactor build.
checkstyle:help	No	Display help information on maven-checkstyle-plugin. Call `mvn checkstyle:help -Ddetail=true -Dgoal=<goal-name>` to display parameter details.

System Requirements

The following specifies the minimum requirements to run this Maven plugin:

Maven	3.6.3
JDK	1.8

System Requirements History

The following specifies the minimum requirements to run this Maven plugin for historical versions:

Plugin Version	Maven	JDK
from 3.4.0 to 3.6.0	3.6.3	8
from 3.2.0 to 3.3.1	3.2.5	8
from 3.1.0 to 3.1.2	3.0	8
3.0.0	3.0	7
from 2.16 to 2.17	2.2.1	7
2.15	2.2.1	6
from 2.9 to 2.14	2.2.1	5
from 2.5 to 2.8	2.0.6	5
from 2.2 to 2.4	2.0.6	1.4
2.1	2.0.2	-
from 2.0-alpha-2 to 2.0	-	-

Usage

You should specify the version in your project's plugin configuration:

<project>
  ...
  <build>
    <!-- To define the plugin version in your parent POM -->
    <pluginManagement>
      <plugins>
        <plugin>
          <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
          <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>
          <version>3.6.0</version>
        </plugin>
        ...
      </plugins>
    </pluginManagement>
    <!-- To use the plugin goals in your POM or parent POM -->
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugin>
      ...
    </plugins>
  </build>
  ...
  <!-- To use the report goals in your POM or parent POM -->
  <reporting>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>3.6.0</version>
      </plugin>
      ...
    </plugins>
  </reporting>
  ...
</project>

For more information, see "Guide to Configuring Plug-ins"