Use spotless (maven) with java in vscode

[Theiaz]

Hello,

my team and me are searching for a Java formatter.

We've got an Java project which is built with maven. As IDEs Intellij IDEA and VSCode (with Redhats Language Support package are used.

Spotless is working fine for Intellij IDEA. Unfortunally, it is not possible for me as an VSCode user to use spotless in an conveniet way. There is no plugin for maven and we do not want to migrate to gradle just because of the plugin support.

Some solutions which we may think of:

1. move from maven to gradle (plugin exists for IDEA and VSCode)
2. use other formatter
3. use pre-commit hook which applys mvn spotless:apply
4. use IDEA instead of vscode

As you can see every solution is not a real solution, but a workaround. I also thought about the possibility to integrate something like the eclipse xml settings with spotless conventions (like described here). However I am not able to find such a file and I don't think it even exists.

Are there any other solution for this kind of problem?

[nedtwigg]

The other solution would be to add an IDE hook into the maven plugin. Here is the Gradle hook, only ~50 lines.

[SSmale]

I am also interested in this. Did you ever find an answer?

[Theiaz]

Nope, did not find any (easy installable) solution :(

[SSmale]

There is the run task on save that I might look at then and add it as a VSCode task

[sashirestela]

A Spotless Maven extension for VSCode would be really great. I am interested in this.

[tkrisztian95]

As a workaround I'm using the VSCode plugin Run On Save to do run a mvn spotless:apply in the background whenever I hit save.

Based on https://www.sethvargo.com/using-google-java-format-with-vs-code/

Slightly changed the command in the plugin settings in my settings.json.

    "emeraldwalk.runonsave": {
        "commands": [
            {
              "match": "\\.java$",
              "cmd": "mvn spotless:apply"
            },
          ],
    }

This way it works with the configuration and stuff in the pom.xml.

Note: Unfortunately I cannot limit it to the single file with the ${file}, so it always do apply Spotless on the whole project.

[RichieRock]

What you can do for a single file, is to install google-java-format cli globally on your machine and then use the same Run On Save plugin to run:

    "emeraldwalk.runonsave": {
        "commands": [
            {
                "match": "\\.java$",
                "cmd": "google-java-format --replace ${file}"
            },
        ],
    }

This way, it will format only the file you're editing and it won't run spotless apply for the whole project.

The result should be the same if you have configured your spotless plugin to use google java format. For other formatting options, you'd need to pass the configuration to google-java-format cli.