Using SonarCloud with Travis CI

SonarCloud is the leading online service to catch Bugs and Security Vulnerabilities in your Pull Requests and throughout your code repositories. Totally free for open-source projects (paid plan for private projects), SonarCloud pairs with existing cloud-based CI/CD workflows, and provides clear resolution guidance for any Code Quality or Security issue it detects. With already more than 1 billion lines of code under analysis, SonarCloud empowers development teams of all sizes to write cleaner and safer code, across more than 20 programming languages.

Please refer to the SonarCloud documentation for more details.

Requirements #

If a Java JRE/JDK is present within the build environment, it has to be at least Java 17.

Java 11 is set as default within build environments, Add:

jdk: openjdk17

to use Java 17 JRE/JDK as default.

Inspecting code with the SonarQube Scanner #

Before inspecting your code, you need to:

  1. Make sure that your repository is correctly activated on Travis CI. See Travis CI Tutorial.
  2. Create a user authentication token for your account on SonarCloud.
  3. Encrypt this token travis encrypt abcdef0123456789 or define SONAR_TOKEN in your Repository Settings
  4. Find which SonarCloud.io organization you want to push your project on and get its key
  5. Create a sonar-project.properties file for your project (see the documentation).

Then add the following lines to your .travis.yml file to trigger the analysis:

addons:
  sonarcloud:
    organization: "sonarcloud_organization_key" # the key of the org you chose at step #3
    token:
      secure: "*********" # encrypted value of your token
script:
  # other script steps might be done before running the actual analysis
  - sonar-scanner

Please take a look at the live example project to know more about this standard use case.

SonarQube Scanner for Maven #

Lots of Java projects build with Maven. To add a SonarCloud inspection to your Maven build, add the following to your .travis.yml file:

addons:
  sonarcloud:
    organization: "sonarcloud_organization_key" # the key of the org you chose at step #3
    token: "*********" # encrypted value of your token
script:
  # the following command line builds the project, runs the tests with coverage and then execute the SonarCloud analysis
  - mvn clean verify sonar:sonar -Pcoverage -Dsonar.projectKey=myorg_myrepo

Please note the following:

  • the “coverage” profile (defined in your POM file) activates the generation of the JaCoCo XML report
  • “sonar.projectKey” can also be set as a property on the main POM file. Its value can be found on the right side of the project homepage on SonarCloud

Please take a look at the live Maven-based example project to know more about this use case.

Without POM update, or if you are Testing Against Multiple JDKs (SonarCloud analysis should be executed only once), or need multiple steps Maven commands ; execute JaCoCo XML report generation at end of your main build. Script section would be like:

script:
- mvn clean org.jacoco:jacoco-maven-plugin:prepare-agent package org.jacoco:jacoco-maven-plugin:report
- if [ "$JAVA_HOME" = "/usr/local/lib/jvm/openjdk11" ]; then mvn sonar:sonar; fi

Analysis of internal pull requests #

SonarCloud can inspect internal pull requests of your repository and write comments on each line where issues are found.

For security reasons, this advanced feature works only for internal pull requests. In other words, pull requests built from forks won’t be inspected.

To activate analysis on pull requests, you need to install the SonarCloud application on your GitHub organization(s).

Note that if you used SonarCloud before the GitHub application and therefore configured GitHub tokens on your projects, you should now delete those tokens from the “Administration > General Settings > Pull Requests” page of your projects.

Upcoming improvements #

Future versions of this add-on will provide the following features:

  • Support for external pull requests.

Accessing full SCM history #

Travis CI uses shallow clone to speed up build times, but a truncated SCM history may cause issues when SonarCloud computes blame data. To avoid this, you can access the full SCM history with:

git:
  depth: false

Deprecated features #

If you are a long-time SonarCloud user, you might have the following entries in your .travis.yml file:

  • “branches”
  • “github_token”

If this is the case, you will get warnings in the log, telling you that this behaviour will be removed soon. You should get rid of those entries in your .travis.yml file to benefit from the latest features of SonarCloud.

Note for SonarQube users #

If you are familiar with SonarQube, you can be tempted to deal with some properties relatives to Branch Analysis (ex: sonar.branch.name) and/or Pull Request Analysis (ex: sonar.pullrequest.key).

These properties are completely useless, the SonarCloud add-on manages them for you depending the analysis type.

Build Config Reference #

You can find more information on the build config format for SonarCloud in our Travis CI Build Config Reference.