Sonar The Java Code Analyzer

Java Code Analyzer

Analyzing java source code is an important aspest of good coding. It helps developer to findout the unused variables, dead code, deviation from the coding standard, possible bugs and many more. There are many open source Java code analyzers are available in the market.Few of them are PMD, SONAR, Find Bugs, QJ-Pro, JDiff, CheckStyle etc. PMD and SONAR are very popular in the industry. This tutorial gives brief on SONAR setup.

SONAR

SONAR (Currently known as SonarQube) is an open source platform to inspect code quality. It identifies the problems as mentioned in the below image.

Sonar report shows the indicative issues. It is upto the developer to decide whether the issue to be fixed. However, it is advisable that the developpers should fix priority 1 and 2 violations.

Sonar Setup

Sonar Installation

• Download sonarqube-5.1.zip and sonar-runner-dist-2.4.zip from the official website and place them together inside a folder (%SOME_PATH%/sonar/).
• Unzip both the files into the same folder.
• sonarqube-5.1 is the server here and sonar-runner-dist-2.4 is the client here. I have placed server and client at the same location.
• Configure the below environment variables

SONAR_RUNNER_HOME=%SONAR_PATH%/sonar/sonar-runner-2.4  
PATH=%PATH%;%SONAR_PATH%/sonar/sonar-runner-2.4/bin  
SONAR_RUNNER_OPTS=-Xmx512m -XX:MaxPermSize=128m    (This is optional)  

• It is advisable to run using JDK1.7 to avoid compiler version specific errors.

Sonar Configuration

Configure and start the Server

By default we are going to use h2 DB. However, Sonar supports other databases like MySQL, Oracle, SQL Server etc

• Open sonar.properties file from %SONAR_PATH%\sonar\sonarqube-5.1\conf location
• Make sure you have minimal setup as shown below

sonar.jdbc.url=jdbc:h2:tcp://localhost:9092/sonar  
sonar.web.port=9000  
http.proxyHost=proxy.abc.com    (if you are behind proxy server)  
http.proxyPort=8080  

• You are done with the server configuration.
• To start the server go inside %SONAR_PATH%\sonar\sonarqube-5.1\bin and open appropriate folder as per your OS. I have gone inside windows-x86-32 folder for my system. Then execute StartSonar.bat file
• http://localhost:9000/ URL should be accessiable once the server starts successfully
• admin/admin is the default user name and password

Configure client

Assumption is that our server and client are running in the same server.

• Open sonar-runner.properties file from %SONAR_PATH%/sonar/sonar-runner-2.4/conf folder
• Specify the Sonar server URL here. In our case below is the configuration

sonar.host.url=http://localhost:9000  

Sonar Setup for the project

• Go to your eclipse project location.
• Create a file called sonar-project.properties file as shown in the below image.
• Make sure the project key is unique among the all sonar projects analized by your server

Analyze the project using sonar-runner

• Open command prompt from project path, set JDK1.7 path (if not set) and execute sonar-runner command
• Once the client is started up then the project will be visible in the dashboard

Important Note As we are not using any database so the analysis report will get stored in sonar.h2 file @%SONAR_PATH%\sonar\sonarqube-5.1\data. After stopping the server you can delete the file from the location so all previous analysis reports will get deleted.

Generate Sonar Report for Analysis

The generated report is purely based on the defined rules in the server. To check the defined rules:

• Login to http://localhost:9000 (User name - admin, password - admin)
• Go to Quality Profile tab
• Default Java profile is Sonar Way
• Check the Rules. (You can deactivate rules if not required)

Run the sonar-runner command from the project path. Once the command gets executed successfully, the project will be visible in the dashboard.

Click on the project available in the dashboard to see Blocking/Critical/Major/Minor violations. It is advisable to fix Blocking/Critical one. It is good to fix major violations as well.

Share the sonar report

You can share the Sonar report in html/pdf format. In this example I am going to show the required configuration to generate report in html

• Open sonar-project.properties file present inside the [project] (#sonar-setup-for-the-project) and add the below configuration

# Generate sonar issues report in html and console
sonar.issuesReport.html.enable=true
sonar.issuesReport.console.enable=true

# Incremental mode performs a fully analysis only on changed code, and does not save the results to the database. 
# It is used on the developer's machine to check the quality of code changes before checking them in
sonar.analysis.mode=incremental

• Open the command prompt from the same location and execute sonar-runner command
• The console will display the summary of the report because of the sonar.issuesReport.console.enable=true property

• A detailed html report will get generated (because of sonar.issuesReport.html.enable=true property) at the following location : %PROJECT_PATH%.sonar\issues-report. By default two html files get generated issues-report.html and issues-report-light.html
• The sample html file looks like as shown below.

Common issues during SONAR setup