Introduction

SpotBugs is a program to find bugs in Java programs. It looks for instances of “bug patterns” —- code instances that are likely to be errors.

This document describes version |release| of SpotBugs. We are very interested in getting your feedback on SpotBugs. Please visit the SpotBugs web page for the latest information on SpotBugs, contact information, and support resources such as information about the SpotBugs GitHub organization.

Requirements

To use SpotBugs, you need a runtime environment compatible with Java version 1.8 or later. SpotBugs is platform independent, and is known to run on GNU/Linux, Windows, and MacOS X platforms.

You should have at least 512 MB of memory to use SpotBugs. To analyze very large projects, more memory may be needed.

Supported Java version

SpotBugs is built by JDK8, and run on JRE8 and newer versions.

SpotBugs can scan bytecode (class files) generated by JDK8 and newer versions. However, support for Java 11 and newer is still experimental. Visit issue tracker <https://github.com/spotbugs/spotbugs/issues>_ to find known problems.

SpotBugs does not support bytecode (class files) generated by outdated JDK such as 10, 9, 7 and older versions.