PMD not building PMD-CLI and PMD-Distribution packages

[NathanMacDiarmid]

I have cloned the PMD source code to my local machine and tried building it using both this terminal command ./mvnw clean verify and from the Maven side panel on VSCode (running clean and verify separately. Both of them build successfully, however, it does not build either the PMD-CLI package or the PMD-Distribution package, resulting in not outputting a .zip file of PMD under pmd/pmd-dist/target. Any suggestions on how we can fix this?

[juanitarodeloo]

I am having the same problem, we are both working on a project that is using PMD.

[adangel]

This is currently a side effect of the cyclic dependency between PMD and PMD-Designer, see #4446 for details.

The two modules pmd-cli and pmd-dist have been extracted into a separate maven profile "cli-dist", which should have been activeByDefault:

pmd/pom.xml

Lines 1178 to 1187 in c5503c9

	<profile>
	<id>cli-dist</id>
	<activation>
	<activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
	</activation>
	<modules>
	<module>pmd-cli</module>
	<module>pmd-dist</module>
	</modules>
	</profile>

But it is obviously not always activeByDefault... Do you have any profiles activated in your settings.xml? That would explain it (sadly, a maven profile that is activeByDefault is only active until any other profile is activated explicitly).

In order to build pmd-cli and pmd-dist, you need activate the profile explicitly:

./mvnw clean verify -Pcli-dist

I hope to fix this issue before the final 7.0.0 release.

[juanitarodeloo]

That must be it, that worked for us. Thank you for getting back to us so quickly!