Sonar Qube – Code Coverage and Code Quality Tool

Introduction:

SonarQube (formerly Sonar) is an open-source platform developed by SonarSource for continuous inspection of code quality to perform automatic reviews with static analysis of code to detect bugs, code smells, and security vulnerabilities on 20+ programming languages.

Lets directly jump into installation and Configuration for a java based application.

Step 1: Download Sonarqube from the link below https://binaries.sonarsource.com/Distribution/sonarqube/sonarqube-7.8.zip

Note 1: Above is the last major supported version for java 8 and use the 7.x version only to ensure your sonarqube application runs properly.

Note 2: You will face weird errors if you dont check for version compatibility and so request you to please check with your version compatibility against java.

Step 2: After download, extract to a folder as required on your file system and start the server as below to test.

Step 3: Add the below lines in maven m2 settings.xml or in your parent pom of the project.

For Example, see below

<settings>
    <pluginGroups>
        <pluginGroup>org.sonarsource.scanner.maven</pluginGroup>
    </pluginGroups>
    <profiles>
        <profile>
            <id>sonar</id>
            <activation>
                <activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
            </activation>
            <properties>
               <!-- Optional URL to server. Default value is http://localhost:9000 -->
                <sonar.host.url>
                  http://myserver:9000
                </sonar.host.url>
            </properties>
        </profile>
     </profiles>
</settings>

Step 4: Go to your Sonarqube bin directory <SONAR_HOME>\bin and select your respective batch file to start sonarqube.

Step 5: If everything is configured properly as mentioned in above steps, you should see a similar output which says “SonarQube is up” as shown below.

Screenshot below for reference:

Step 6: Once it is up, now it is time to configure your Application to start using SonarQube. Please add the below dependency to your pom.xml to start using sonarqube in application.

<!-- https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.sonarsource.scanner.maven/sonar-maven-plugin -->
<dependency>
    <groupId>org.sonarsource.scanner.maven</groupId>
    <artifactId>sonar-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>3.7.0.1746</version>
</dependency>

Step 7: Refresh the pom or update project to download the dependencies. Once it is downloaded, run the maven using the command below

maven sonar:sonar

Step 8: More information can be found on the below reference sites to get more understanding.

https://docs.sonarqube.org/latest/