Why I cannot easily use built-in checks?

[MarcinOrlowski]

We use Checkstyle to guard our Java project. The approach is simple: built-in "Google Checks" and some suppressions. That's it. I only want to maintain my suppressions.xml. Nothing more. I have a InteliJ plugin, I have Gradle plugin. All fine. But when I try to achieve the same results using Checkstyle in shell, things are not that simple. I am simply not getting why. I am running Debian based distro so

apt install checkstyle

and all good. BUT, to run it I need to give it a config file. I do not want to have my personal config here - I want to use bundled Google Checks as my base, and add my suppression file on top of it. I do not want to keep copy of google_checks.xml (this can change across versions), not I want to do all the trickery with extracting it from JAR etc, etc. I am fine with whatever bundled Google checks is minus my suppression. Why cannot I simply do anything as straightforward as :

checkstyle --style=google-checks --suppression-file=/path/suppressions.xml [....]

Why is such usecase not supported even Checkstyle is at version 8 now? Do I miss something? What I do not understand?

[pbludov]

Related issues:
#8418
#6942

[romani]

Thanks a lot for writing us.

You should use https://checkstyle.org/cmdline.html#Download_and_Run

java -jar checkstyle-8.44-all.jar -c /google_checks.xml MyClass.java

Path to config is resource in jar.

I hope you understand that google style is versioned by Google and by Checkstyle separately.
Google style is just a config in checkstyle jar.

For suppressions please read https://checkstyle.org/google_style.html#Google_Suppressions

Please read about different filters/suppression modules , whey are bit different and good for different goals https://checkstyle.org/config_filters.html

All is almost the already as you want but maybe names a bit different.