How to customize recipes to meet your needs
OpenRewrite recipes are opinionated – meaning that they encourage certain conventions, patterns, or practices. The idea behind this is to provide sensible defaults that work for most people most of the time without requiring any fiddling.
However, what if you run into a situation where you would like recipes to behave differently? Your first instinct might be that you need to copy the existing recipe and modify it to meet your needs.
Fortunately, in many cases, recipes can be easily modified or combined without needing to write any code.
In this guide, we'll walk you through how to do this.
Customizing a recipe
For the sake of this guide, let's assume that you took a look at the Common static analysis issues recipe and decided that you don't like the fact that it disallows multiple variables from being declared on the same line. You want to remove that recipe from the list of recipes being executed – but you still want to run all of the other ones.
To edit this recipe, we'll take advantage of the Moderne recipe builder.
Step 1: Navigate to the Moderne Recipe Builder
Open up the Moderne Platform, sign in, and navigate to the Moderne Recipe Builder.
Step 2: Create a new recipe
On the right side of the page, you should see a Recipe dropdown button. Click it and then select New:
A modal will pop up where you can enter a name, Id, and a description for the recipe. Name it something intuitive such as:
Once you've filled out the modal, press Save in the bottom right corner.
Step 3: Add the recipe to modify
So far, we've created a root node for the recipe. The next thing we want to do is add the recipe we want to modify to this node. To do so, mouse over the root node in the recipe list and press the + button to add a recipe:
In the modal that pops up, search for Common static and add the Common static analysis issues recipe by selecting it and then pressing Select recipe:
You should then see that all of the recipes that make up the common static analysis recipe are added to your recipe list:
Step 4: Modify the recipes to meet your needs
With all of those recipes in the builder, we can now go ahead and change it to match our needs. As we said earlier, let's pretend that we want to remove the recipe that doesn't allow us to define multiple variables on one line.
To do so, let's search for a recipe with that name and then press the trash can icon to remove it from the recipe list:
Step 5: Download the modified recipe and run it
Once you have the recipe to where you want it, you can download it as a YAML file so that you can use OpenRewrite to run it. To do so, click on the Download YAML button in the Recipe drop-down menu:
You can then run it as you would any other OpenRewrite recipe.
The recipe builder can also be useful if you want to combine multiple recipes together. For instance, let's say that you wanted to make your own best practices recipe. You could search for any add many recipes together and then save it as a new, larger recipe: