Android Lint

Android Lint is a static analysis tool (which despite the name is notlimited to Android, and within Google for example is used to analyzeJava and Kotlin server side code as well as Android and even desktopsoftware like IDEs.)

Lint's focus is on finding bugs (whether they are related tocorrectness, performance, security, internationalization, usability andso on); it's not a source code style checker.

Available documentation:

• Lint Features
• Recent Changes
• Documents for users of lint, in theusage folder:
  • Complete Book, containing all of the below documents as chapters, suitable for offline reading
  • Issue documentation which lists all the available checks and provides documentation for each one.
  • Performance Tuning Tips
  • How to suppress incidents
  • How to use baselines
  • How to uselint.xml files
  • Gradle plugin DSL
  • Using a newer version of lint than the Gradle bundled one
  • Lint command line
  • Environment variables and properties
• Documents for authors of additional lint checks, in theapi-guide folder:
  • Complete Book, containing all of the below documents as chapters, suitable for offline reading
  • Basics
  • A Sample Lint Check
  • Analyzing data flow
  • Publishing a Lint check
  • AST Analysis
  • Unit Testing
  • Test Modes
  • Annotations
  • Adding Quick Fixes
  • Terminology
  • Partial analysis
  • Crafting error messages
  • Configuring detectors with options
  • Frequently Asked Questions
• Documents for lint internals, intended for developers of lint itself, in theinternal folder:
  • Guidelines
  • Generating Issue Documentation
  • Testing dev builds

Documentation History:

• June 2022: Added documentation forcrafting error messages
• May 2022: Noticed that the document rendering was broken, such that many chapters were missing from the api-guide: “Adding Quickfixes”, “Partial Analysis”, “Data Flow Analyzer”, “Annotations”, and “Options”. These are now included.
• November 2021: Added documentation foroption handling
• September 2021: Added documentation forannotation handling
• July 2021: Added documentation fortest modes
• June 2021: Added documentation for thedataflow analyzer,Lint Gradle DSL andcommand line flags.
• May 2021: Added documentation for individual lint issues
• March 2021: Initial version