“PMD is a source code analyzer. It finds common programming flaws like unused variables, empty catch blocks, unnecessary object creation, and so forth.” (from the site’s about page)“PMD” doesn’t mean anything, by the way.
When to use it:
- Build time - maven plugin or Jenkins plugin
- IDE (coding time) – support for different IDEs
- one from Eclipse Marketplace - take a look at this tutorial page, and full pmd ruleset configuration is here.
- another one from PMD’s site, also see this tutorial page.
(1) Installation: Help –> Install New Software –> ADD.
(2) If behind corporate firewall and can’t install it online, then just download the ZIP file from https://github.com/pmd/pmd-eclipse-plugin/releases, and decompress the file and add it as local. You can add zip file by clicking archive, but that didn’t work for me. Snapshot is here.
For some reason, the latest Eclipse Photon 2018-09 release, PMD’s site plugin doesn’t work, even with the latest snapshot.