How to suppress all checks for a file in Checkstyle?

I'm doing an override for a third party class and I want to suppress all checks for it (since I'm only keeping it around until the patch is accepted).

Is there a way to suppress all checks for a file?

I tried using "*" but that fails.

Don't know whether you're using command line or in an IDE, but you'll basically need a suppresions file. If you're manually editing the Checkstyle config file, add a new module to it:

<module name="SuppressionFilter">
    <property name="file" value="mysuppressions.xml" />
</module>

Your mysuppression.xml can be something like:

<?xml version="1.0"?>

<!DOCTYPE suppressions PUBLIC
    "-//Puppy Crawl//DTD Suppressions 1.1//EN"
    "http://www.puppycrawl.com/dtds/suppressions_1_1.dtd">

<suppressions>
    <suppress files="TheClassToIgnore\.java" checks="[a-zA-Z0-9]*"/>
</suppressions>

The value for "files" attribute is basically a regex for your source files, and the value for the "checks" attribute is regex for what checks to skip ("[a-zA-Z0-9]*" basically means skip everything). This is the pattern you're looking for I guess?

I was able to suppress the checks in a file by adding the SuppressionCommentFilter tag in my checks.xml:

First, I added the FileContentHolder tag as a child of TreeWalker tag (this step is not needed since version 8.1 of com.puppycrawl.tools:checkstyle):

<module name="TreeWalker">
    ...
    <module name="FileContentsHolder"/>
    ...
</module>

Then I added the SuppressionCommentFilter in the checks.xml (since version 8.1 of com.puppycrawl.tools:checkstyle - under "TreeWalker" node):

<module name="SuppressionCommentFilter"/>

In each file that I wanted to suppress the checks I inserted the following comment in the first line of the file:

// CHECKSTYLE:OFF

aberrant80's answer helped a lot. With the help of his hint - using regex pattern matching, I was also able to suppress checkstyle for an entire package by adding this to the checkstyle-suppressions.xml file. For eg. to skip checkstyle checks on all auto generated java files under the jaxb package,

    <suppressions>
        <suppress checks="[a-zA-Z0-9]*" files="[\\/]jaxb[\\/]" />
    </suppressions>

If you're using the Checkclipse Eclipse plugin for Checkstyle, you can include or exclude file patterns (including directories) by going to the Checkclipse > File Filter tab under project properties. For example, my project contains src and test directories at the top level. I want Checkstyle applied to only files in the src directory (omitting test), so I added an include pattern that looks like this:

src/.+java$

As you can see, it uses a regex-style syntax for pattern specification.

@aberrant80's answer is very inspiring although it didn't work in my project. In order to suppress any warnings that checkstyle looks for in Foo.java, according to [link][1], if maven is used:

<plugin>
	<groupId>org.apache.maven.plugins</groupId>
	<artifactId>maven-checkstyle-plugin</artifactId>
    ...
		<configuration>
			...
			<configLocation>checkstyle.xml</configLocation>
			<suppressionsLocation>checkstyle-suppressions.xml</suppressionsLocation>
			...
		</configuration>				
	...
</plugin>

And in checkstyle-suppressions.xml

<!DOCTYPE suppressions PUBLIC "-//Puppy Crawl//DTD Suppressions 1.1//EN" "http://www.puppycrawl.com/dtds/suppressions_1_1.dtd">
<suppressions>
    <suppress files="Foo.java" checks="[a-zA-Z0-9]*" />
</suppressions>

So far the highest version is 1.1 (1.2 does not exist). [1]: http://maven.apache.org/plugins/maven-checkstyle-plugin/examples/suppressions-filter.html

There is an option to ignore write protected files. Or files in a package.

If you wish to not have a group of files within a project inspected, you can filter these files out so they are not inspected by creating a file filter

The file filter uses regex to determine what files to exclude. The regex operates on the complete file name - because of this, you could also exclude whole folders. In this case you could exclude the whole package if you wished.

If you google around a bit - you could probably find some Checkstyle Configuration Propertie files that have examples of what you're looking for. I would suggest after you do so - save it as a bit of a template so you can refer to it in future situations