Checkstyle Command Line - Version @CHECKSTYLE_VERSION@

Description

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

Installation

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

checkstyle-@CHECKSTYLE_VERSION@.jar
ANTLR 2.7.1 classes. antlr.jar is included in the distribution.
Jakarta Regexp 1.2 classes. jakarta-regexp-1.2.jar is included in the distribution.

Usage

The command line usage is:

  java com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main \
       [-f <format>] [-p <propertiesFile>] [-o <file>] [-r <dir>] file...

Checkstyle will process the specified files and by default report errors to standard out in plain format. The options are:

-f format - specify the output format. Options are "plain" for the DefaultLogger and "xml" for the XMLLogger. Defaults to "plain".
-p propertiesFile - specify a properties file to use. See here for all available configuration options.
-o file - specify the file to output to.
-r dir - specify the directory to traverse for Java source files.

Examples

Run checkstyle on a file

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

Run checkstyle on all java files in a directory

  java  com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main -r src/

Run checkstyle on a file and use specified properties

  java  com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main \
        -p myCheckstyle.properties Check.java

Run checkstyle on a file and output to a file in XML format

  java  com.puppycrawl.tools.checkstyle.Main \
        -f xml -o build/checkstyle_errors.xml Check.java

Tip

It is possible to run Checkstyle directly from the JAR file using the -jar option. Example would be:

  java  -jar checkstyle-all-@CHECKSTYLE_VERSION@.jar  Check.java