Analyzing projects before creating pull requests, round 2 —13 November 2016

After playing for a few days with the pre-push hook to analyze changed files in a branch, I found it pretty useful. Despite its obvious shortcomings, most notably the slowness of running one analysis for each file.

So I decided to take it a bit further:

• Forked sonarlint-cli temporarily to make it accept multiple --src and --tests options. With this change, now it’s possible to analyze all the files of the changeset in a single analysis, so the hook can run much faster.

• Now it’s possible to analyze test sources.

• Added helper scripts to make it easier to install the custom built sonarlint and the hooks.

• Added a pre-commit hook, which works very similarly to the pre-push hook, but it looks at the changeset in what is about to be committed, instead of a branch.

As before, see more details in the README.

Something that might be a big remaining weakness is these assumptions:

• Source files must match the pattern src/
• Test files must match the pattern src/ and test or Test

These assumptions should be just fine for most Java projects, but I’m not sure about others. It would be great to have something that works for a wider audience, but I won’t know what exactly needs to be done until I get some feedback. That’s your job ;-)

Let me know what you think. If you have difficulties or find something strange, feel free to create an issue on GitHub.