Any easy way to generate a Findbug HTML report from Maven without site:site?

Question

I am trying to integrate FindBugs in a maven project. Does anyone have a sample pom.xml generating a simple findbug HTML report in target? Is it possible to generate this report without having to run site:site?

Answer 1

Findbugs jar contains 5 XSLT transformations that can be used to convert hard to read XML to easy to read HTML so we can use xml-maven-plugin plugin to execute transformation and here is the configuration:

<plugins>
    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>findbugs-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.4.0</version>
        <executions>
            <execution>
                <id>findbug</id>
                <phase>verify</phase>
                <goals>
                    <goal>check</goal>
                </goals>
            </execution>
        </executions>
        <configuration>
            <findbugsXmlOutputDirectory>
                ${project.build.directory}/findbugs
            </findbugsXmlOutputDirectory>
            <failOnError>false</failOnError>
        </configuration>
    </plugin>

    <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>xml-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0</version>
        <executions>
            <execution>
                <phase>verify</phase>
                <goals>
                    <goal>transform</goal>
                </goals>
            </execution>
        </executions>
        <configuration>
            <transformationSets>
                <transformationSet>
                    <dir>${project.build.directory}/findbugs</dir>
                    <outputDir>${project.build.directory}/findbugs</outputDir>
                    <stylesheet>fancy-hist.xsl</stylesheet>
                    <!--<stylesheet>default.xsl</stylesheet>-->
                    <!--<stylesheet>plain.xsl</stylesheet>-->
                    <!--<stylesheet>fancy.xsl</stylesheet>-->
                    <!--<stylesheet>summary.xsl</stylesheet>-->
                    <fileMappers>
                        <fileMapper
                                implementation="org.codehaus.plexus.components.io.filemappers.FileExtensionMapper">
                            <targetExtension>.html</targetExtension>
                        </fileMapper>
                    </fileMappers>
                </transformationSet>
            </transformationSets>
        </configuration>
        <dependencies>
            <dependency>
                <groupId>com.google.code.findbugs</groupId>
                <artifactId>findbugs</artifactId>
                <version>2.0.0</version>
            </dependency>
        </dependencies>
    </plugin>
</plugins>

To get the report just execute mvn clean install.

The above code snippet contains all 5 possible transformations so try them all and hopefully you will find one you like.

I tried it with maven 3 and Finbugs 2.0