Sonar installation with PostgreSQL

Introduction

Sonar is an open source web application for analyzing and measuring software code quality, offering visual reporting and metrics with historical information aggregation across numerous data collection points. Analysis of the Java language is provided by default and support for other languages is available through commercial and open source plugins.

This article describes the process for installing and integrating Sonar with a PostgreSQL database.

Configuration has been performed using Sonar 2.13.1 in standalone mode (Jetty servlet container) and PostgreSQL 9.1.3.1 on Windows.

Update – 9 November 2012

The installation steps described can also be followed for installing Sonar 3 (note: there may be a difference in the number of database tables created).

Create Sonar database user

Create the sonar user:

CREATE USER sonar WITH PASSWORD ‘s0me1nsecurepassw0rd’;

List users:

postgres=# SELECT usename, usesysid FROM PG_USER;
 usename  | usesysid
----------+----------
 postgres |       10
 sonar    |    16393
(2 rows)

Create Sonar database

Sonar requires a database with UTF8 character set. Create the database as follows:

CREATE DATABASE sonar WITH OWNER sonar ENCODING ‘UTF8’;

List databases:

postgres=# SELECT datname, datdba, encoding FROM pg_database;
  datname  | datdba | encoding
-----------+--------+----------
 template1 |     10 |        6
 template0 |     10 |        6
 postgres  |     10 |        6
 sonar     |  16393 |        6
(4 rows)

Configure JDBC for Sonar

Edit conf/sonar.properties altering properties to use the newly created database. The tables will be automatically created when Sonar starts.

Start Sonar

Start Sonar in standalone mode.

Validate Sonar tables

Log into the sonar database:

psql -d sonar -h localhost -U sonar

Validate that 47 sonar tables exist:

sonar=> SELECT table_name FROM information_schema.tables WHERE table_schema = 'public';
table_name
---------------------------
 schema_migrations
 projects
 metrics
 rules_categories
 rules_parameters
 project_links
 rules
 rule_failures
 project_measures
 users
 active_rule_parameters
 snapshot_sources
 active_rules
 alerts
 rules_profiles
 events
 properties
 groups
 groups_users
 group_roles
 user_roles
 dependencies
 measure_data
 filters
 filter_columns
 criteria
 active_filters
 quality_models
 characteristic_edges
 characteristics
 characteristic_properties
 active_dashboards
 dashboards
 widgets
 widget_properties
 review_comments
 reviews
 active_rule_param_changes
 active_rule_changes
 manual_measures
 notifications
 duplications_index
 snapshots
 action_plans
 loaded_templates
 resource_index
 action_plans_reviews
(47 rows)

Browse to Sonar

Access the Sonar application at localhost on the default port at http://localhost:9000. You will see an empty project list ready for population with metrics generated from your projects.