Last week’s I had the opportunity to configure Sonar for a pretty big project. The application has over 3M lines of code and use different languages and technologies, from C# and Silverlight to JavaScript, C++ and embedded applications.
The main scope was to see if we can configure Sonar for this project. We decided at this step to exclude the embedded part of the application for Sonar. This was decided because of the time limitations. I’m almost sure that we can configure Sonar for embedded part without any kind of problems.In the next part of the post I will present different issues that I encountered during Sonar configuration.
Where to store custom configuration?
Sonar gives you the possibility to specify different custom configuration at server level or on each project that is analyzed. Personally I prefer to have all the configuration (tools path location, unit tests projects pattern and so on) at project level – in sonar-project.properties file. For me is more easily to manage and if you have two different project that use two different tools, it will be very easily to configure them. Also, on Sonar server multiple person can have access and change the configuration (more teams on the same server). But at sonar-project.properties files, only the team that is working on the project will have access.
Where to put and store the plugins?
In Sonar, for each custom plugin you need to install or setup 3rd part applications or tools. First thing that you ask yourself where should I install and configure them.
I recommend to put all this tools in a folder called “Sonar-Plugins” or something similar. In this way if someone will need to check the plugins resources, change the configuration or configure a new Sonar server, it will be pretty easy to find all the resources and reconfigure them. Also, in this way it will be easier for you to manage them – you don’t need to search each tool in different folders.
What encoding should I set?
When you create the sonar-project.properties files don’t forget to set the encoding of source file to UTF-8. The default encoding is different from the one that is used in .NET projects.
sonar.sourceEncoding=UTF-8
If you have different project used to create the install package I recommend to use ssonar.exclusion property. Using it, you can specify what folders to be excluded.
sonar.exclusions=Install/*
To be able to specify a custom name of the project, you need to use the following 3 properties available for this purpose:
sonar.projectKey=MyFooProject
sonar.projectVersion=1.0
sonar.projectName=MyFooProject
In the case you have the SLN project in different location that the sonar-project.properties or you have multiple SLN files under the same folder you can use the following property to specify exactly what SLN should be used:
sonar.dotnet.visualstudio.solution.file=MyFooProject.sln
If you installed Silverlight in a custom location or you have a 64 bits machines, that you will need to specify the location where Silverlight is installed. You can do as in the following example:
sonar.silverlight.3.mscorlib.location=c:/Program Files (x86)/Reference Assemblies/Microsoft/Framework/Silverlight/v3.0
sonar.silverlight.4.mscorlib.location=c:/Program Files (x86)/Reference Assemblies/Microsoft/Framework/Silverlight/v4.0
sonar.silverlight.5.mscorlib.location=c:/Program Files (x86)/Reference Assemblies/Microsoft/Framework/Silverlight/v5.0
In general Sonar will detect what are the projects that contains unit tests. In practice this is not happening. Because of this, you will need to specify the project pattern for projects that contains unit test. In the following example you all the projects that contains the ‘Test’ string will be processed as unit tests projects.
sonar.donet.visualstudio.testProjectPattern=*Test*
All plugins has the same configurations (the general one). To access this properties, you need to use the following path:
sonar.[pluginName].[propertyName]=[value]
sonar.stylecop.installDirectory=C:/Sonar/sonar-plugins/StyleCop
If you have a plugin that you don’t want to run you can set the mode of the plugin to ‘skip.
sonar.fxcop.mode=skip
The installdirectory property is you solution. Don’t forget to use ‘/’ and not ‘\’.
sonar.fxcop.installDirectory=c:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft Fxcop 10.0
I hope that this tips helped you to configure Sonar.
Thanks for the good tips. By the way, how do you specify skipProjectPattern for multiple patterns. For example, I want to skip any project that has word "contracts" or "entities" in its project name?
ReplyDeleteCan you have different stylecop settings for unit test and other project?
ReplyDeleteBy default is at project level. People usually forget this because they are using only a stylecop file. Take a look on http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sourceanalysis/archive/2008/05/25/managing-source-analysis-project-settings.aspx
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