Troubleshooting the analysis

If your SonarQube analysis errors out.

See also the Troubleshooting section on the corresponding Scanner page.

Viewing the analysis progress status

During analysis, data is requested from the server, the files provided to the analysis are analyzed, and the resulting data is sent back to the server at the end in the form of a report, which is then analyzed asynchronously server-side.

Analysis reports are queued and processed sequentially, so it is quite possible that for a brief period after your analysis log shows completion, the updated values are not visible in your SonarQube project. However, you will be able to tell what’s going on because an icon will be added on the project homepage to the right of the project name. Mouse over it for more detail (and links if you’re logged in with the proper permissions).

Screenshot of SonarQube showing an analysis is in progress.

Screenshot of SonarQube showing an analysis is in progress.

The icon goes away once processing is complete, but if analysis report processing fails for some reason, the icon changes:

Screenshot of SonarQube showing the last analysis has failed.

Screenshot of SonarQube showing the last analysis has failed.

Out of memory error

If your analysis errors out with java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: GC overhead limit exceeded then it means that your project is too large or too intricate for the scanner to analyze with the default memory allocation. To fix this you’ll want to allocate a larger heap (using -Xmx[numeric value here]) to the process running the analysis. Some CI engines may give you an input to specify the necessary values, for instance if you’re using a Maven Build Step in a Jenkins job to run analysis. Otherwise, use Java Options to set a higher value. Note that details of setting Java Options are omitted here because they vary depending on the environment.

You can also add an exclusion to manage the files and folders you don’t need to analyze by limiting your Analysis scope. Additionally, using a Solid-state drive or something similar will help speed up the analysis process and thus use less memory, especially for small file access.

PKIX path building failed

If your analysis errors out with PKIX path building failed then it means that your SonarQube server is configured with HTTPS and a self-signed SSL certificate (see Securing the server behind a proxy in Operating the server). However, the certificate is not correctly configured in the scanner machine’s JVM. This configuration is outside of SonarQube scope. The server certificate is unknown and could not be validated with the provided truststore. To solve the issue, you need to Managing TLS certificates on client side. See Oracle’s documentation for more information.

Various error messages

The format of the analysis property sonar.token= is invalid

You may encounter this issue when using SONAR_TOKEN as a secret in a calling workflow in GitHub in case the called workflow doesn’t manage to read it as a secret. In that case, make sure that the secret is inherited from the calling workflow (you may use the secrets: inherit keyword). See GitHub documentation for more information.

The maximum number of open files was reached

On a Linux system, see Configuring the maximum number of open files and other limits in On Linux systems.

On a MacOS system, see Configuring the maximum number of open files in On macOS systems.

Error when analyzing files with non-ASCII characters in the name

When analyzing files with non-ASCII characters in the name, if the Malformed input or input contains unmappable characters error is raised then you should make sure that the environment variables LC_ALL and LANG are properly set before running the analysis as shown below.

export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
export LANG="en_US.UTF-8"

Debugging the analysis

For debugging purposes, you can use the sonar.scanner.internal.dumpToFile parameter to output to a specific file a full list of properties retrieved by the scanners (CLI, Gradle, Maven, and NPM). The properties include user properties passed through command line arguments, configuration files, environmental variables, and other properties relevant to the specific scanners.

Possible value: path to the output file name.

Deprecated: sonar.scanner.dumpToFile

Note: The equivalent output is available in Your Project > Project Settings > Background Tasks > 3-dots menu > Show SonarScanner Context. If the analysis report fails, the list is not generated in Show SonarScanner Context.