If you are a Java developer you must be familiar with maven - a widely used Java build system. Maven has simple and reliable execution lifecycle: it runs several consecutive phases (like compile, test, package or deploy), and during each phase a set of plugins can be run, for example javac via maven-compiler-plugin during phase ‘compile’.

For a particular plugin one declares a <plugin> section in pom.xml, and each plugin can have several executions. Each execution is bound to a particular phase of build lifecycle, and it may include several goals. Goal is a particular action the plugin can execute, for example compile source code or run tests or check code style.

We are developing diktat - an automatic kotlin code style checker and formatter, which is intended to be used as CI/CD tool that constantly checks quality of code that developers are adding to their projects. To provide a convenient way to run it for all developers we support run from CLI and are preparing to release a dedicated maven plugin to run diktat directly from maven.

This article is describing our experience and problems that we have faced when we were creating Gradle plugin for our diktat project.

This article will make a brief comparison of existing opensource linters and static analyzers for Kotlin and introduce a new Kotlin linter (checker&fixer) called diKTat.