Running as a service

How to install and start SonarQube Server 2026.5 as a service in case of a ZIP installation. The operation depends on your operating system.

Installing SonarQube Server from the ZIP file is deprecated. It's still supported, but support will be removed in a future release, so consider the Docker image or the Helm chart instead. See the deprecation policy for details.

The agentic features run as containers, so they have no ZIP equivalent. You can keep SonarQube Server on the ZIP file and deploy their containers alongside it. See Deploying AI agents.

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 Advanced setup.

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 end 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 -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true -jar /opt/sonarqube/lib/sonar-application-2026.1.0.119033.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 $*"

Register SonarQube at boot time (RedHat, CentOS, 64 bit):

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

Register SonarQube at boot time (Ubuntu, 64 bit):

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