SonarQube Community Build | Server installation and setup | From ZIP file | Starting / stopping server | Running as a service

Running SonarQube as a service

On Windows

Installing or uninstalling SonarQube as a service

> <sonarqubeHome>\bin\windows-x86-64\SonarService.bat install
> <sonarqubeHome>\bin\windows-x86-64\SonarService.bat uninstall

Starting the service

> <sonarqubeHome>\bin\windows-x86-64\SonarService.bat start

By default, the service will use the Java executable available on the Windows PATH. This setting can be changed by setting the environmental variable SONAR_JAVA_PATH. See more in Adjusting the Java executable path.

Stopping the service

> <sonarqubeHome>\bin\windows-x86-64\SonarService.bat stop

This command does a graceful shutdown where no new analysis report processing can start, but the tasks in progress are allowed to finish. The time a stop will take depends on the processing time of the tasks in progress. You'll need to kill all SonarQube Server processes manually to force a stop.

Checking the service status

To check if the SonarQube service is running:

> <sonarqubeHome>\bin\windows-x86-64\SonarService.bat status

On Linux with systemd

On a Unix system using systemd, you can install SonarQube as a service. You cannot run SonarQube as root in Unix systems. Ideally, you will have created a new account dedicated to the purpose of running SonarQube. Let's suppose:

The user used to start the service is sonarqube
The group used to start the service is sonarqube
The Java Virtual Machine is installed in /opt/java/
SonarQube has been unzipped into /opt/sonarqube/

Then create the file /etc/systemd/system/sonarqube.service based on the following:

[Unit]
Description=SonarQube service
After=syslog.target network.target

[Service]
Type=simple
User=sonarqube
Group=sonarqube
PermissionsStartOnly=true
ExecStart=/bin/nohup /opt/java/bin/java -Xms32m -Xmx32m -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -jar /opt/sonarqube/lib/sonar-application-25.1.0.102122.jar
StandardOutput=journal
LimitNOFILE=131072
LimitNPROC=8192
TimeoutStartSec=5
Restart=always
SuccessExitStatus=143

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Because the sonar-application jar name ends with the version of SonarQube, you will need to adjust the ExecStart command accordingly on install and at each upgrade.
All SonarQube directories should be owned by the sonarqube user.
If you have multiple Java versions, you will need to modify the java path in the ExecStart command. This also means SONAR_JAVA_PATH will not work with SonarQube as a service.

Once your sonarqube.service file is created and properly configured, run:

sudo systemctl enable sonarqube.service
sudo systemctl start sonarqube.service

On Linux with initd

The following has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 and CentOS 6.2.

You cannot run SonarQube as root in *nix systems. Ideally, you will have created a new account dedicated to the purpose of running SonarQube. Let's suppose the user used to start the service is sonarqube. Then create the file /etc/init.d/sonar based on the following:

#!/bin/sh
#
# rc file for SonarQube
#
# chkconfig: 345 96 10
# description: SonarQube system (www.sonarsource.org)
#
### BEGIN INIT INFO
# Provides: sonar
# Required-Start: $network
# Required-Stop: $network
# Default-Start: 3 4 5
# Default-Stop: 0 1 2 6
# Short-Description: SonarQube system (www.sonarsource.org)
# Description: SonarQube system (www.sonarsource.org)
### END INIT INFO
 
su sonarqube -c "/usr/bin/sonar $*"

sudo ln -s <sonarqubeHome>/bin/linux-x86-64/sonar.sh /usr/bin/sonar
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/sonar
sudo chkconfig --add sonar

sudo ln -s <sonarqubeHome>/bin/linux-x86-64/sonar.sh /usr/bin/sonar
sudo chmod 755 /etc/init.d/sonar
sudo update-rc.d sonar defaults

Once registration is done, run:

sudo service sonar start

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