Are custom rules still disabled by default

[sschuberth]

I'm just wondering whether the sentence

By default all rules not annotated with @ActiveByDefault are disabled.
That means your custom rules are also disabled if you have not explicitly enabled
them in the detekt yaml configuration file.

is still true, as my custom rules neither have the @ActiveByDefault annotation, nor are they activated in the YAML configuration file, but still they work fine.

So, is this really still valid, or can the sentence be deleted?

[cortinico]

but still they work fine.

What do you mean with work fine?

The sentence about @ActiveByDefault still holds true. Please note that the annotation is just metadata. Once we decide to enable a rule by default for all the users, we set enabled: true for such rule and add the @ActiveByDefault annotation.

This means that if the source code of such rule does not contain @ActiveByDefault, that rule is not active by default.

Custom rules are completely under your control. So it's up to you to eventually annotate them and enable/disable them as you wish.

[marschwar]

No, the ruleSetId is defined by the RuleSetProvider

https://github.com/oss-review-toolkit/ort/blob/71b8949a1df5af6995ced653a9af908d225e4ff6/detekt-rules/src/main/kotlin/OrtRuleSet.kt#L27

Therefor your rule set id is ORT. So it is possible to disable all of your rules by adding

ORT:
  active: false

to the .detekt.yml.

Coming back to your original question. Unless you explicitly configure a rule (set) to be active: false , it is considered active.

detekt/detekt-core/src/main/kotlin/io/gitlab/arturbosch/detekt/core/rules/RuleSets.kt

Lines 19 to 20 in 4efa571

	fun Config.isActive(): Boolean =
	valueOrDefault(Config.ACTIVE_KEY, true)

So I guess we should update the documentation or change the implementation.

[marschwar]

I am afraid, that my answer is not entirely true though. By default rules should be inactive.

detekt/detekt-api/src/main/kotlin/io/gitlab/arturbosch/detekt/api/ConfigAware.kt

Lines 44 to 48 in 4efa571

	/**
	* Is this rule specified as active in configuration?
	* If a rule is not specified in the underlying configuration, we assume it should not be run.
	*/
	val active: Boolean get() = valueOrDefault(Config.ACTIVE_KEY, false)

I will investigate some more.

[marschwar]

I think I figured out what is going on. At the moment it is not possible to configure your rules as they do not pass along the provided config. If you change

class OrtImportOrder : Rule() {

to

class OrtImportOrder(config: Config) : Rule(config) {

it is possible to configure your custom rule

ORT:
  active: true
  OrtPackageNaming:
    active: true
  OrtImportOrder:
    active: false

So currently you are using the EmptyConfig which by default always returns to for the active config key.

So the sentence in question holds true after all, even though the documentation should not encourage writing rules that use an EmptyConfig.

[cortinico]

So the sentence in question holds true after all, even though the documentation should not encourage writing rules that use an EmptyConfig.

Thanks for clarifying @marschwar 🙏

Fun fact: we could probably create a custom ruleset with rules to validate custom rules code (e.g. DoNotUseEmptyConfig and so on).

[BraisGabin]

That have a lot of sense. I think that we should go for the template repository. That should help A LOT to have the scaffolding. I'm going to create an issue to track it.