This action runs PMD static code analysis checks.
It can execute PMD with your own ruleset against your project. It creates a SARIF report which is uploaded as a build artifact. Furthermore the build can be failed based on the number of violations (see the extended examples).
The action can also be used as a code scanner to create "Code scanning alerts".
The input rulesets is mandatory.
steps:
- uses: actions/setup-java@v2with:
java-version: '11'distribution: 'temurin'
- uses: pmd/pmd-github-action@v1with:
rulesets: 'ruleset.xml'Use a specific PMD version (6.40.0) and fail the build based on the number of violations:
steps:
- uses: actions/setup-java@v2with:
java-version: '11'distribution: 'temurin'
- uses: pmd/pmd-github-action@v1id: pmdwith:
version: '6.40.0'sourcePath: 'src/main/java'rulesets: 'rulesets/java/quickstart.xml,ruleset.xml'
- name: Fail build if there a violationsif: steps.pmd.outputs.violations != 0run: exit 1Create Code scanning alerts by uploading a SARIF file to GitHub:
steps:
- uses: actions/setup-java@v2with:
java-version: '11'distribution: 'temurin'
- uses: pmd/pmd-github-action@v1with:
rulesets: 'ruleset.xml'analyzeModifiedFilesOnly: false
- name: Upload SARIF fileuses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v1with:
sarif_file: pmd-report.sarifThe created alerts are available in the project under "Security" / "Code scanning alerts". See also Uploading a SARIF file to GitHub.
| input | required | default | description |
|---|---|---|---|
token | no | "github.token" | Personal access token (PAT) used to query the latest PMD release and the download URL for PMD. By default the automatic token for GitHub Actions is used. Learn more about automatic token authentication Learn more about creating and using encrypted secrets |
version | no | "latest" | PMD version to use. Using "latest" automatically downloads the latest version. Available versions: https://github.com/pmd/pmd/releases Note: Only PMD 6.31.0 and later is supported due to required support for Sarif report format. |
sourcePath | no | "." | Root directory for sources. Uses by default the current directory |
rulesets | yes | Comma separated list of ruleset names to use. | |
analyzeModifiedFilesOnly | no | "true" | Instead of analyze all files under "sourcePath", only the files that have been touched in a pull request or push will be analyzed. This makes the analysis faster and helps especially bigger projects which gradually want to introduce PMD. This helps in enforcing that no new code violation is introduced. Depending on the analyzed language, the results might be less accurate results. At the moment, this is not a problem, as PMD mostly analyzes each file individually, but that might change in the future. If the change is very big, not all files might be analyzed. Currently the maximum number of modified files is 300. Note: When using PMD as a code scanner in order to create "Code scanning alerts" on GitHub, all files should be analyzed in order to produce a complete picture of the project. Otherwise alerts might get closed too soon. |
createGitHubAnnotations | no | "true" | By default, all detected violations are added as annotations to the pull request. You can disable this by setting FALSE. This can be useful if you are using another tool for this purpose. |
| output | description |
|---|---|
violations | Number of detected violations. Can be used to fail the build. |
Below are a list of known limitations for the PMD GitHub Action:
You can analyze Java sources. But this actions current lacks the ability to configure the
auxclasspathhence the results won't be as good as they could be. For Java projects, integrating PMD via maven or gradle is recommended. Furthermore, the project is analyzed as is. No build is initiated before by this action. For Java this means, that the project is not compiled.While you can provide a custom ruleset, you can only use custom rules entirely defined within your ruleset. This means that this action is limited to XPath rules for custom rules. In order to support custom Java based rules, the accompanying jar file containing the custom rule implementation would need to be provided.
Setting additional environment variables is not possible. This might be needed for some languages, e.g. Visualforce.
Github Marketplace PMD Actions:
The scripts and documentation in this project are released under the MIT License