Installing the SonarQube server from the ZIP file

First, check the requirements. Then follow these steps for your installation:

Download the distribution

Download and unzip the distribution (do not unzip into a directory starting with a digit).

SonarQube cannot be run as root on Unix-based systems, so create a dedicated user account for SonarQube if necessary.

<sonarqubeHome> (below) refers to the path to the directory where the SonarQube distribution has been unzipped.

Perform various settings

Set access to the database

Edit <sonarqubeHome>/conf/sonar.properties to configure the database settings. Templates are available for every supported database. Just uncomment and configure the template you need and comment out the lines dedicated to H2:

Example for PostgreSQL
sonar.jdbc.username=sonarqube
sonar.jdbc.password=mypassword
sonar.jdbc.url=jdbc:postgresql://localhost/sonarqube

Add the JDBC driver

Drivers for the supported databases (except Oracle) are already provided. Do not replace the provided drivers; they are the only ones supported.

For Oracle, copy the JDBC driver into <sonarqubeHome>/extensions/jdbc-driver/oracle.

Configure the Elasticsearch storage path

By default, Elasticsearch data is stored in <sonarqubeHome>/data, but this is not recommended for production instances. Instead, you should store this data elsewhere, ideally in a dedicated volume with fast I/O. Beyond maintaining acceptable performance, doing so will also ease the upgrade of SonarQube.

Edit <sonarqubeHome>/conf/sonar.properties to configure the following settings:

sonar.path.data=/var/sonarqube/data
sonar.path.temp=/var/sonarqube/temp

The user used to launch SonarQube must have read and write access to those directories.

Adjust the Java executable path

By default, the scripts will use the Java executable available in the PATH. If there are multiple versions of Java installed on your server, you may need to explicitly define which version of Java is used.

It is possible to overwrite the default Java executable by setting the environmental variable SONAR_JAVA_PATH.

Start the web server

Execute the following script to start the server:

• On Linux: <sonarqubeHome>/bin/linux-x86-64/sonar.sh start
• On macOS: <sonarqubeHome>/bin/macosx-universal-64/sonar.sh start
• On Windows: <sonarqubeHome>/bin/windows-x86-64/StartSonar.bat

You can now browse SonarQube at http://localhost:9000 (the default system administrator credentials are admin/admin).

Next steps

Once your server is installed and running, you're ready to begin analyzing source code.