Upgrade guide

This is a generic guide for upgrading across versions of SonarQube. Carefully read the release upgrade notes of your target version and of any intermediate version(s). If you intend to upgrade your LTA (Long-Term Active) version, please check the  LTA-to-LTA release upgrade notes. 

Before upgrading, we recommend practicing your upgrade on a staging environment that's as similar to your production environment as possible. For more on this and other important upgrading concepts, read through the Before you upgrade page.

If you need to upgrade a cluster, see Configure and operate a cluster.

Database disk usage recommendations

During your upgrade, tables may be duplicated to speed up the migration process. This could cause your database disk usage to temporarily increase to as much as double the normal usage. Because of this, we recommend that your database disk usage is below 50% before starting a migration.

Upgrading instructions

You can upgrade your SonarQube instance using the ZIP file, Docker image, or Helm Chart. To expand the upgrading instructions, click the option below that corresponds to your setup.

$ docker stop <container_id>
$ docker rm <container_id>

$> docker run -d --name sonarqube \
    -p 9000:9000 \
    -e SONAR_JDBC_URL=... \
    -e SONAR_JDBC_USERNAME=... \
    -e SONAR_JDBC_PASSWORD=... \
    -v sonarqube_data:/opt/sonarqube/data \
    -v sonarqube_extensions:/opt/sonarqube/extensions \
    -v sonarqube_logs:/opt/sonarqube/logs \
    <image_name>

helm upgrade --install -f values.yaml -n <your namespace> <your release name> <path to sonarqube helm chart>

Reverting to the previous version

If you need to revert to the previous version of SonarQube, the high-level rollback procedure for all deployments is as follows:

1. Shutdown your SonarQube instance or cluster.
2. Roll back your database to the backup you took before starting the upgrade.
3. Switch back to the previous version of your SonarQube installation.
4. Start your SonarQube instance or cluster.

Changing your edition

You can move to a different SonarQube edition (for example, moving from Community Edition to a commercial edition) while you're upgrading your version. Just use the appropriate edition file or Docker image tag in the upgrade instructions above.

If you want to move to a different edition without upgrading your SonarQube version, the steps are exactly the same as in the upgrading instructions above without needing to navigate to http://yourSonarQubeServerURL/setup or reanalyze your projects.

Migrating from a ZIP file instance to a Docker instance

To migrate from the ZIP file to Docker:

1. Configure your Docker instance to point to your existing database.
2. Shut down your ZIP instance.
3. Start your Docker instance.

Additional steps and information

Once you’ve finished a technical upgrade, you should rebuild database indexes and refresh database statistics before starting SonarQube and reanalyzing your projects.

Oracle clean-up

There's an additional step you may want to perform if you're using Oracle. On Oracle, the database columns to be dropped are now marked as UNUSED and are not physically dropped anymore. To reclaim disk space, Oracle administrators must drop these unused columns manually. The SQL request is ALTER TABLE foo DROP UNUSED COLUMNS. The relevant tables are listed in the system table all_unused_col_tabs.

PostgreSQL clean-up

For PostgreSQL, that means executing three operations:

1. VACUUM FULL
2. REINDEX DATABASE <db>
3. ANALYZE

According to the PostgreSQL documentation:

In normal PostgreSQL operation, tuples that are deleted or obsoleted by an update are not physically removed from their table; they remain present until a VACUUM is done.

Scanner update

When upgrading SonarQube, you should also make sure you’re using the latest versions of the SonarQube scanners to take advantage of features and fixes on the scanner side. Please check the documentation pages of the scanners you use for the most recent version compatible with SonarQube and your build tools.

See also this section for what might change after a software update.

SonarQube as Linux or Windows service

If you use an external configuration, such as a script or Windows Service to control your server, you'll need to update it to point to <NEW_SONARQUBE_HOME>.

• For Linux it depends how you implemented the service
• For Windows you can update your service by running:

> sc delete SonarQube
> $NEW_SONARQUBE_HOME\bin\windows-x86-64\SonarService.bat install

Rebuilding indexes

If your upgrade requires the rebuild of Elasticsearch indexes, your projects and Applications will become available as they are reindexed. Portfolios won't be available until all projects are indexed.

Release upgrade notes

Usually, SonarQube releases come with some specific recommendations for upgrading from the previous version. You should read the upgrade notes for each version between your current version and the target version.