How to prevent a Java project from building when TODO present

Question

Recently code containing a debugging override was release to production. The code was clearly marked

// TODO - Remove before releasing to production

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Answer 1

You could configure a maven checkstyle plugin to fail the build if it find TODO comments in your code.

---

To get checkstyle to fail a build

To get checkstyle to fail a build I followed the advice of this answer to a similar question: https://stackoverflow.com/a/42276077/7421645 they found they needed to add the configuration warning and the TodoComment needs to include a regex format property to Fail the build.

  
    org.apache.maven.plugins
    maven-checkstyle-plugin
    2.17
    
      
        com.puppycrawl.tools
        checkstyle
        7.5.1
      
    
    
      
        validate
        validate
        
          check
        
        
          true
          
          
            
              
                
              
            
          
          
          UTF-8
          true
          true
          true
          warning
        
      
    
  

You can also include more checks by choosing a pre-built checkstyle.xml

---

Always run checkstyle, but only fail if the profile is activated -Pci-build

To run:

mvn clean install -Pci-build

If you were using checkstyle, I'd expect you would want to gather more value from it than just checking for TODO comments. It doesn't look like you can configure multiple checkstyle configurations, e.g. inline and a configLocation for a Jenkins build job. But if you modify a checkstyle.xml that is suitable for your project, you can modify the severity of modules that you want to be errors:

And you can use a property to turn on failure when you want, e.g. for server builds but not local in your maven pom.xml:

  
    false
  

  
    
      ci-build
      
        true
      
    
  

And then you can use that as a property in your build config:

  
     my_google_checks.xml
     UTF-8
     true
     false
     ${fail.on.error}
     warning
  

I changed the failOnViolation to false to allow warnings in the checkstyle config to occur. And I'm using a modified version of the google checkstyle, but there is no reason why you couldn't apply the same with the inline config if you only wanted to check for TODO or a few other things.

This approach of failing on a builder server can be turned on when the profile "ci-build" is passed to maven.

When the ci-build profile isn't sent, checkstyle still runs, but just produces a report. Of course you could set it up so it still failed on anything style concerns that we deemed worthy of an error.

---

Only run checkstyle if the profile is activate -Pci-build

To run:

mvn clean install -Pci-build

In this case, you don't want checkstyle to run at all by default. So we just activate the checkstyle build profile when we want it.

 
    
      ci-build
      
        
          
            org.apache.maven.plugins
            maven-checkstyle-plugin
            2.17
            
              
                com.puppycrawl.tools
                checkstyle
                7.5.1
              
            
            
              
                validate
                validate
                
                  check
                
                
                  my_google_checks.xml
                  UTF-8
                  true
                  true
                  true
                  warning