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.

UPDATE:

Using a MySql db is a doddle. Once you’ve installed the MySql you simply comment out the Derby db connection details and uncomment the MySql section in the sonar.properties file (which lives in the conf directory of your sonar installation)

sonar.jdbc.url:                            jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/sonar?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf8
sonar.jdbc.driverClassName:                com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
sonar.jdbc.validationQuery:                select 1

And that’s it!