PHPMD ant task usage

To ease the usage of PHPMD in your build process we provide an ant task that integrates PHPMD into the ant build tool. The ant task jar file can be found in the download section of the PHPMD homepage.

To make the task available in your ant build file you have two options. The first option is to copy or link the *.jar file into the lib directory of your ant installation.

mapi@arwen ~ $ wget \
     http://phpmd.org/download/extensions/ant-phpmd-0.1.0.jar
...
mapi@arwen ~ $ ln -s ~/ant-phpmd-0.1.0.jar /opt/ant/lib/ant-phpmd.jar

The second option is to call ant with the command line switch -lib

mapi@arwen ~ $ ant -lib ant-phpmd-0.1.0.jar

Now we can start using PHPMD in our ant build.xml file by adding a task definition that informs ant about the new task and registers it with a custom identifier.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<project name="phpmd.example" default="example" basedir=".">

    <taskdef name="phpmd" classname="org.phpmd.ant.PHPMDTask"/>

</project>

Now the PHPMD task can be called through an xml element named <phpmd /> in this build:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<project name="phpmd.example" default="example" basedir=".">

    <taskdef name="phpmd" classname="org.phpmd.ant.PHPMDTask"/>

    <target name="example">
        <phpmd rulesetfiles="unusedcode" failonerror="off">
            <formatter type="xml" toFile="${basedir}/pmd.xml" />
            <fileset dir="${basedir}/PHP/PMD">
                <include name="*.php" />
            </fileset>
        </phpmd>
    </target>

</project>

Parameters

The following attributes can be defined on the PHPMD task xml-element.

Attribute	Description	Required
rulesetfiles	A comma delimited list of ruleset files ('rulesets/basic.xml,rulesets/design.xml') or identifiers of build-in rulesets.	Yes, unless the ruleset nested element is used
failonerror	Whether or not to fail the build if any errors occur while processing the files	No
minimumPriority	The rule priority threshold; rules with lower priority than they will not be used	No

Nested xml elements

The <formatter /> specifies the format of and the output file to which the report is written.

Parameters

Attribute	Description	Required
format	The report output format. Supported formats are xml,html and text.	Yes
toFile	A filename into which the report is written	Yes

The <ruleset /> xml element is another way to specify rulesets. Here is a modified version of the previous example:

<target name="example">
    <phpmd failonerror="off">
        <formatter type="text" toFile="${basedir}/pmd.xml" />
        <ruleset>unusedcode</ruleset>
        <ruleset>codesize</ruleset
        <fileset dir="${basedir}/PHP/PMD">
            <include name="*.php" />
        </fileset>
    </phpmd>
</target>

Postprocessing the report file with XSLT

There are several XSLT scripts which can be used to transform the XML report into some nice html pages. To do this, make sure you use the XML formatter in the PHPMD task invocation, i.e.:

<formatter type="xml" toFile="${builddir}/~report.xml"/>

Then, after the end of the PHPMD task, do this:

<xslt in="${builddir}/~report.xml"
      style="${basedir}/report.xslt"
      out="${reportdir}/report.html" />