Can Checkstyle target a specific file when run through Maven?

Question

Background

I have a Maven project with Checkstyle.

I run mvn checkstyle:check to run Checkstyle against all project files.

I want to run it against a specific file.

As an example, I want to run it against src/main/java/MyClass.java.

The following works:

mvn checkstyle:check -Dcheckstyle.includes="**\/MyClass.java"

But if I had any other classes with the same name elsewhere in the codebase, it would also check those. This is unfortunate.

The following does NOT work:

mvn checkstyle:check -Dcheckstyle.includes="src/main/java/MyClass.java"

It simply succeeds, telling me I have 0 errors. And for the record, it has errors. So it's clearly not checking that file.

Question

How can I adjust this command to run Checkstyle against a specific file given by its path, without using wildcards?

Answer 1

I am visiting this question after a couple of years so here is what I did to make it work:

 mvn checkstyle:check -Dcheckstyle.includes="**\/Foo.java"

As mentioned in the previous answer, you can refer to the documentation for more details.

Here is what you need to know about the property checkstyle.includes:

Specifies the names filter of the source files to be used for Checkstyle.

Type: java.lang.String  
Required: Yes  
User Property: checkstyle.includes  
Default: **\/*.java