Configuring SonarQube scans

SonarQube provides an overview of the overall health and quality of your source code and highlights issues that are found in new code. The code analyzers detect tricky bugs, such as null-pointer dereferences, logic errors, and resource leaks, for more than 20 coding languages.

Configure SonarQube to continuously analyze and measure the quality of your source code:

In the IBM Cloud console, click the menu icon and select DevOps. On the Toolchains page, click the toolchain to open its Overview page. Alternatively, on your app's Overview page, on the Continuous delivery card, click View toolchain. Then, click Overview.

a. Click Add a Tool.

b. In the Tool Integrations section, click SonarQube.
Type a name for this instance of the SonarQube tool integration.
Type the URL for the SonarQube instance that you want to open when you click the SonarQube card from your toolchain.
Optional: Type the username that you use to connect to the SonarQube server.

You need to specify a username only if you use a password to connect to the SonarQube server. If you use an authentication token to connect, leave this field empty.
Type the password or authentication token that you use to connect to the SonarQube server.
If the server cannot be on the public internet, select Advanced. IBM Cloud cannot validate the connection details that you provide and certain functions that require API access to this server are disabled. The delivery pipeline works only by using a private worker that has network access to this server.
Click Create Integration.
On your Toolchain's Overview page, on the Third-Party tools card, click SonarQube to view the dashboard for the SonarQube instance that you connected to.

Adding SonarQube to the continuous integration pipeline

Default SonarQube instance

If sonarqube-config is set to default, then SonarQube is used by default to scan. This scan runs as Docker-in-Docker.

The instance used is available only during the run. Therefore, you can't access the dashboard.

By default, the pipeline uses SonarQube community edition which has only limited checks.Many vulnerability rules and hostspot issues are not covered under Community Edition.
To verify if a vulnerability is checked in community edition, refer to thread in Sonarqube community question
The default implementation which is the SonarQube community Edition instance registered with CISO is not an ITSS-approved edition.SonarQube Enterprise Edition is the only ITSS-approved edition.

To download SonarQube, refer SonarQube Downloads

SonarQube instance on the dev cluster

If sonarqube-config is set to cluster, the pipeline creates a SonarQube instance during the pipeline run in the dev cluster. You can access this instance after the static-scan stage successfully runs.You can access the SonarQube dashboard locally by port forwarding.

Existing SonarQube instance

Set sonarqube-config to custom, to add your own SonarQube instance to your existing pipeline, add the tool integration to your toolchain, and then add the SonarQube tool integration parameter to the pipeline. For more information, see Configuring SonarQube.

Parameters

To run the SonarQube scan, the pipeline needs the following continuous integration parameters:

Table 1. Continuous integration pipeline parameters
Name	Type	Description	Required or Optional
cluster-name	Text	The name of the Docker build cluster.	Required
dev-region	Text	The IBM Cloud region that hosts the cluster.	Required
opt-in-sonar	Text	The option to enable the SonarQube scan.	Required
sonarqube	Tool integration	The SonarQube tool integration.	Optional
sonarqube-config	Text	Runs a SonarQube scan in an isolated Docker-in-Docker container (default configuration) or in an existing development Kubernetes cluster (cluster configuration). Alternatively, you can bring your own SonarQube instance and configure the SonarQube tool integration (custom configuration). Options: `default`, `cluster`, or `custom`. Default is `default`. For more information, see (Adding SonarQube to the continuous integration pipeline).	Required
opt-in-sonar-hotspots	Text	The Sonarqube scan for detecting hotspots.	Optional

For more information about pipelines parameters, see Pipeline parameters.

If you add multiple SonarQube tool integrations to your pipeline, you can switch between them by changing the value of the SonarQube pipeline parameter, which is a tool integration parameter.

Plug-ins installed in SonarQube

DevSecOps Pipelines uses SonarQube Version 10.0 by default.

To know more about the list of preinstalled plug-ins, refer to plug-ins

Issues reported from SonarQube

DevSecOps Pipelines filters out the problems that reported during SonarQube scan. The pipelines exclusively create Compliance Incidences for problems that are not of type CODE_SMELL or BUG. The pipeline also skips problems for which the status is CLOSED.

Updating the quality gate

If you use the SonarQube instance that the pipeline created, you can update the default quality gate.

Go to the SonarQube dashboard that was created by the URL from the pipeline logs in the static-scan task.

Figure 1. SonarQube dashboards
Click Quality Gates > Create.
Set your Quality Gate by using one of the following options:
- Click Set as Default to set the newly created quality gate as the default.
- From the dashboard, select the project and then click Project Settings > Quality Gate to use the newly created quality gate for the project.
Specify which quality gate that you want to associate with the project. New scans are evaluated by this quality gate and evidence is created by the quality gate's results.

To learn more about SonarQube, see SonarQube Documentation.

Using your own configuration file

You can modify the default configuration without using your own SonarQube instance. Create a sonar-project.properties file in the repo that you want to create the configuration file in. If our script detects an existing configuration sonar-project.properties file in the repo, it uses that file instead of the default file. For more information about possible analysis parameters in the configuration file, see Analysis Parameters here.

Make sure that you add the correct login credentials and host URL to the configuration file.

Using another static scan implementation

You can modify your .pipeline-config.yaml file to add your own custom script to the static-scan stage to use your own static scan implementation.

Learn more about SonarQube

To learn more about SonarQube, see Integrate your SonarQube analysis into your toolchain.