Maven Code Quality Dashboard and TeamCity

I’ve recently implemented a code-quality dashboard at outbrain for maven java projects and hooked it into the our TeamCity continuous integration server. I was very pleased with the result, but the process had a few hickups, so I thought I’d mention them here for future generations.

A code quality dashboard includes the following components:

• Tests status – failed, passed and  skipped count along with good looking graphs
• Code coverage report detailing all covered and uncovered lines and branches, including nice coverage graphs
• Copy-Paste detection by CPD
• FindBugs report
• jDepend report

The process had two phases: phase one is where I add the dashboard report to maven’s site goal in my pom.xml and phase two is where I make this report available at TeamCity, which is a bit of a manual work bot not too bad.

To add those nice reports, edit your pom.xml to add:

  <reporting>
    <plugins>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>cobertura-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-pmd-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.3</version>
        <configuration>
          <linkXref>true</linkXref>
          <targetJdk>1.5</targetJdk>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-surefire-report-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.4.2</version>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>jdepend-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>findbugs-maven-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>2.0.1</version>
        <configuration>
          <xmlOutput>true</xmlOutput>
          <effort>Max</effort>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>
      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
        <artifactId>dashboard-maven-plugin</artifactId>
      </plugin>
    </plugins>
  </reporting>

Now, in theory, that would have been all. All you have to do is run mvn site and bang – you have the reports under target/site. That’s why maven is nice.

However, if you’re running a multi-module project then mvn-site is buggy… all links to the subproject are broken links. But no despair, here’s the solution – configure the site plugin to place its generated content where the site plugin expects it to be… yeah, I know it sounds confusing, the thing is that the site plugin has a bug so it’s links to the submodule projects are broken, but here’s an easy fix that worked for me (as long as the projects are only one directory deep under the parent pom.xml). In the parent pom.xml add:

      <plugin>
        <groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>maven-site-plugin</artifactId>
        <configuration>
          <outputDirectory>../target/site/${project.name}</outputDirectory>
        </configuration>
      </plugin>

Now the reports are fixed.

Next step is to add them into TeamCity.

Step one: Tell teamcity to collect the site artifacts (html, css, js…). Go to the build configuration and under Artifacts Paths add **/target/site/**/*

Step two: Add a Code Quality tab to the build results. You do that by ssh-ing to the teamc host and editing

vi /teamc/TeamCity/.BuildServer/config/main-config.xml

to add

<report-tab title="Code Quality" basePath="target/site/" startPage="dashboard-report-details.html" />

Here’s the result:

That’s it! Now run your build with mvn site and get those gorgeous looking reports right in your teamcity build results page.