Limiting Checkstyle to certain packages - checkstyle

Question

I have a project with several hundred packages. It's mostly generated code from a conversion from COBOL to inline java so the vast majority of it (~11,000 files) is something I do not want to run checkstyle on. I do have a couple packages in the project that are "real" java that I have added to replace utilities that could not be generated by the code conversion and I do want to run checkstyle on those.
I'm having trouble getting the suppression to work properly.
This is the relevant fragment from the checkstyle.xml:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE module PUBLIC
"-//Puppy Crawl//DTD Check Configuration 1.3//EN"
"http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/dtds/configuration_1_3.dtd">
<!--
Checkstyle configuration that checks the Google coding conventions from Google Java Style
that can be found at https://google.github.io/styleguide/javaguide.html.
Checkstyle is very configurable. Be sure to read the documentation at
http://checkstyle.sf.net (or in your downloaded distribution).
To completely disable a check, just comment it out or delete it from the file.
Authors: Max Vetrenko, Ruslan Diachenko, Roman Ivanov.
-->
<module name = "Checker">
<property name="charset" value="UTF-8"/>
<property name="severity" value="warning"/>
<property name="fileExtensions" value="java, properties, xml"/>
<module name="FileTabCharacter">
<property name="eachLine" value="true"/>
</module>
<module name="SuppressionFilter">
<property name="file" value="${config_loc}/checkstyleSuppress.xml"/>
<property name="optional" value="false"/>
</module>
<module name="TreeWalker">
<module name="OuterTypeFilename"/>
<module name="IllegalTokenText">
<property name="tokens" value="STRING_LITERAL, CHAR_LITERAL"/>
<property name="format"
value="\\u00(09|0(a|A)|0(c|C)|0(d|D)|22|27|5(C|c))|\\(0(10|11|12|14|15|42|47)|134)"/>
<property name="message"
value="Consider using special escape sequence instead of octal value or Unicode escaped value."/>
</module>
<module name="AvoidEscapedUnicodeCharacters">
<property name="allowEscapesForControlCharacters" value="true"/>
<propert ...
I'm confident that the checkstyleSuppress.xml file is getting read because checkstyle will error out if I add a character to the file name to make it wrong.
The content of checkstyleSuppress.xml is as follows:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE suppressions PUBLIC
"-//Checkstyle//DTD SuppressionFilter Configuration 1.2//EN"
"https://checkstyle.org/dtds/suppressions_1_2.dtd">
<suppressions>
<suppress files="[/\\].+" checks=".*"/>
<suppress checks=".*" files="app[\\/]dbio[\\/].java"/>
<suppress checks=".*" files="app[\\/]dbio[\\/]internal[\\/].java"/>
<suppress checks=".*" files="app[\\/]f17*[\\/].java"/>
<suppress checks=".*" files="app[\\/]f17*[\\/]internal[\\/].java"/>
</suppressions>
What I'm trying to do is suppress all checks for anything in the app.dbio and app.f17* packages. To see if my rules are running I added the first line in the file which I thought would suppress all checks on all files.
None of these filters are suppressing anything. Checkstyle checks all files in all packages (and reports over 400,000 violations, which is a bit too many to wade through for the ones I care about! lol)
Most projects are ground up, so I have previously used checkstyle with no suppression. This is my first attempt to limit the scope of the code review and it's not going as I had hoped. I'm not sure where my issue lies here.
Any suggestions are much appreciated.

Answer 1

I think BeforeExecutionExclusionFileFilter is the thing you are looking for. You can provide regexp(s) which matches packages you want to exclude, they will not be checked.