CheckStyle

Checkstyle is a quality control tool allowing to check adherence of java programs to coding standards. Checkstyle is written in java and runs on all platforms.

Features

Checkstyle comes by default with configurations files supporting Sun Code Conventions and Google Java Style but nearly everything can be configured. New checks can be written in java classes so nearly all kind of coding standards can virtually be implemented with Checkstyle.

Interoperability

Checkstyle is already integrated in many different IDE in the form of plugins for instance. There is a large list of tools related to Checkstyle.

Installation

On Ubuntu you can install CheckStyle has following:

sudo apt-get install checkstyle

Installing CheckStyle as a standalone tool is easy:

  • Create a directory %SCRIBESTOOLS%\CheckStyle.
  • Download checkstyle-X.Y-all.jar web.
  • Copy the jar file into %SCRIBESTOOLS%\CheckStyle\checkstyle-all.jar (remove the version number).
  • Copy the files checkstyle.cmd and checkstyle.sh into the directory.
  • Add the %SCRIBESTOOLS%\CheckStyle directory to the path.

Launching CheckStyle

You check the installation as following. The option -h and -v display the CheckStyle help and version respectively:

checkstyle -h
checkstyle -v

If you have a java program at hand (let’s say MyProg.java) and you want to use Sun Code Conventions on it type:

checkstyle -c /sun_checks.xml MyProg.java

Documentation

A lot of documentation is available online web.