SpotBugs Maven Plugin exclude a directory

Question

I use SpotBugs Maven Plugin for a static analysis and I would like to exclude a directory from the inspection. Looking at the spotbugs:check goal documentation, it seems that it is not possible to configure the plugin is such a way. I also checked documentation for a SpotBugs filter file.

In Apache Maven PMD Plugin this can be done by using excludeRoots parameter:

<excludeRoots>
  <excludeRoot>target</excludeRoot>
</excludeRoots>

Is it possible to exclude a directory from SpotBugs inspection?

Answer 1

It is possible to exclude a directory from inspection with SpotBugs, though the approach is different to the one you described for PMD. It is a two step process:

1. First create an XML filter file specifying the criteria for the directory(s) to be excluded.

2. Then, in pom.xml refer to that that file using the optional <excludeFilterFile> setting. Unfortunately, the documentation for that setting is very brief.

As a simple example:

1. Create a filter file named ignore.xml containing the following which refers to a directory named mydir:

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
   <FindBugsFilter>
       <Match>
           <Source name="~mydir\..*"/>
       </Match>
   </FindBugsFilter>
   

   The documentation for the <Source> tag is here. See the section on Java element name matching for details on how to specify the name of the <Source>.

2. Then in pom.xml, in the specification for spotbugs-maven-plugin, include an <excludeFilterFile> tag so that mydir is ignored by SpotBugs:

   <configuration>
     <excludeFilterFile>ignore.xml</excludeFilterFile>
   </configuration>
   

Notes:

• There is also an <includeFilterFile> tag. See the section titled Specifying which bug filters to run in the usage documentation.

• As well as Source, SpotBugs provides several other ways to specify what code is to be included or excluded from checking. See the filter file documentation for the Package, Class, Method, Local, Field and Type tags.