Installing Sonar on the CI server

I’ve been trying out Sonar and it looks great – it’s much more presentable than trawling through maven sites to find build reports. Anyway, I decided to install it on the live build server today, and this is how it happened:

What you’ll need:

Maven

Java JDK

Download Sonar from http://www.sonarsource.org/downloads/

Copy the zip archive over to the build server. I unzipped it in /home/maven/sonar

I’m running a linux x86 32 bit system, so to start Sonar, I cd to:

/home/maven/sonar/sonar-2.5/bin/linux-x86-32

and run:

./sonar.sh start

Sometimes it can take a few minutes for the server to start up, so be patient. Eventually you’ll find your Sonar site up and running at http://{SERVERNAME}:9000 (where {SERVERNAME} is the name of your build server where you installed Sonar. It should look a bit like this:

Next, you have to configure Maven. I’m running with the default Apache Derby database which ships with Sonar, so I added the following section to my maven settings.xml (which I found under /home/maven/maven-2.0.9/conf). You need to add this to the <profiles> section:

<profile>
<id>sonar</id>
<activation>
<activeByDefault>true</activeByDefault>
</activation>
<properties>

<sonar.jdbc.url>
jdbc:derby://localhost:1527/sonar;create=true
</sonar.jdbc.url>
<sonar.jdbc.driver>org.apache.derby.jdbc.ClientDriver</sonar.jdbc.driver>
<sonar.jdbc.username>sonar</sonar.jdbc.username>
<sonar.jdbc.password>sonar</sonar.jdbc.password>
<sonar.host.url>http://localhost:9000</sonar.host.url>

</properties>
</profile>

Then you will need to run your first project against sonar! Go to the root of one of your projects on the build server (for me they were in /home/maven/Bamboo/xml-data/build-dir/PROJ_NAME) and run:

mvn clean install sonar:sonar

Go to http://{SERVERNAME}:9000 and you should now see your project listed. Click on it and revel in sonar goodness:

I'll migrate to a MySQL db next week, and put an update here about what to do.