Customizing Helm chart

How to perform the most important SonarQube Helm chart customization when working with SonarQube Server.

While we only document the most pressing SonarQube Server Helm chart customizations in this documentation, there are other possibilities for you to choose to customize the chart before installing. Please see the Helm chart README file for more information on these. In particular, see the recommended production use case values.

You can customize the SonarQube Server Helm chart:

• By editing the default values in the values.yaml file.

• Or directly in the Helm chart installation command line, see Installing Helm chart.

Parameters passed in the command line have precedence over parameters set in values.yaml.

To set up SonarQube Server monitoring, see Setting up monitoring.

Enabling OpenShift

If you want to install SonarQube Server on OpenShift, you must enable OpenShift in the Helm chart. In that case:

• The Helm chart will auto-configure itself to comply with the default OpenShift SCCs (Security Context Constraints).

• Not using a default SCC in your OpenShift cluster may cause problems.

To enable OpenShift in the Helm chart:

1. Set OpenShift.enabled to true.

2. Set OpenShift.createSCC to false.

3. If you want to make your application publicly visible with Routes, you can set route.enabled to true. Please check the configuration details in the Helm chart documentation to customize the Route based on your needs.

Ensuring a restricted security level

About the Pod security level

Below is the Pod security level applied by default to each container. To apply a security level, a default SecurityContext is set on the container through the SonarQube Server Helm chart.

Container	Pod security level	Note
SonarQube Server application containers	restricted
SonarQube Server init containers	restricted
postgresql containers	restricted
init-sysctl	privileged	Utility software that requires root access.
init-fs	baseline	Utility software that requires root access. To disable the container, set initFs.enabled in the Helm chart to false.

The SecurityContext below is set as default on all restricted containers.

allowPrivilegeEscalation: false
runAsNonRoot: true
runAsUser: 1000
runAsGroup: 1000
seccompProfile:
  type: RuntimeDefault
capabilities:
  drop: ["ALL"]

In a Kubernetes installation

To run the SonarQube Server Helm chart in a full restricted namespace, you must disable the init-sysctl and init-fs containers by setting in the Helm chart:

• initSysctl.enabled to false.

• initFs.enabled to false.

Since these containers are used to perform some settings at the host/kernel level, disabling them may require additional configuration steps. For more information, see Elasticsearch prerequisites in the Helm chart documentation.

In an OpenShift installation

The configuration described in Enabling OpenShift above forces the disabling of the init-sysctl and init-fs containers. These containers should not be required in the vast majority of cases for an Openshift installation. Therefore, an Openshift installation is compatible with restricted SCCv2 (Security Context Constraints).

Setting access to your external database

You must configure the access to your database (except if you want to use SonarQube for test purposes and want to use the embedded database H2).

To do so:

1. Set jdbcOverwrite.enabled to true.

2. Set jdbcOverwrite.jdbcUrl to the database URL and jdbcOverwrite.jdbcUsername to the database username.

3. Store the database password in a Kubernetes secret and set jdbcOverwrite.jdbcSecretName to the secret’s name.

4. If you use an Oracle database:

   • Let the Helm chart download and inject the corresponding JDBC driver in SonarQube by setting jdbcOverwrite.oracleJdbcDriver.url to the URL of the Oracle JDBC driver to be downloaded.

   • In case the download requires it, set jdbcOverwrite.oracleJdbcDriver.netrcCreds to the name of the Kubernetes secret containing the .netrc file that stores the credentials.

For more information, see this section in the ArtifactHub page of the Helm Chart.

Enabling persistency in Elasticsearch

SonarQube Server comes with a bundled Elasticsearch, and as Elasticsearch is stateful, so is SonarQube Server. There is an option to persist the Elasticsearch indexes in a Persistent Volume, but with regular killing operations by the Kubernetes Cluster, these indexes can be corrupted. By default, persistency is disabled in the Helm chart.

Enabling persistency decreases the startup time of the SonarQube Server Pod significantly, but you are risking corrupting your Elasticsearch index. You can enable persistency by adding the following to the values.yaml:

persistence:
  enabled: true

Leaving persistency disabled results in a longer startup time until SonarQube Server is fully available, but you won’t lose any data as SonarQube Server will persist all data in the database.

Using custom certificates for your code repository

When you are working with your own Certificate Authority or in an environment that uses self-signed certificates for your code repository platform, you can create a secret containing this certificate and add this certificate to the Java truststore inside the SonarQube deployment.

To add a certificate to the Javatrustore inside the SonarQube deployment:

1. Ask the relevant team to provide you with a PEM format certificate or certificate chain. We will assume it to be called cert.pem on the following commands.

2. Generate the kubernetes secret, e.g. with this command:

kubectl create secret generic --from-file cert.pem <secretName> -n  <sonarqubeNamespace>

3. In SonarQube’s value.yaml file, add:

caCerts:
  enabled: true
  secret: <secretName>

Creating an Ingress to make SonarQube Server service accessible from outside

To make the SonarQube Server service accessible from outside of your cluster, you most likely need an Ingress.

The Sonar Helm chart has an optional dependency on the NGINX Ingress Helm chart which installs the NGINX Ingress controller (To install the NGINX Ingress Helm chart through SonarQube Server Helm chart, set ingress-nginx.enabled to true in SonarQube Server’s values.yaml.) You should use it only in a test environment. In a production environment, it’s highly recommended that you use your own Ingress controller since the controller is a critical part of the software chain.

To create an Ingress resource through the Helm chart:

• Add the following to your SonarQube Server’s values.yaml. In this configuration, we use the Ingress class NGINX with a body size of at least 64MB since this is what we recommend.

ingress:
  enabled: true
  # Used to create an Ingress record.
  hosts:
    - name: <Your SonarQube Server's FQDN>
      # Different clouds or configurations might need /* as the default path
      path: /
      # For additional control over serviceName and servicePort
      # serviceName: someService
      # servicePort: somePort
  annotations: 
    nginx.ingress.kubernetes.io/proxy-body-size: "64m"

Related pages

• Installation overview

• Before you start

• Installing Helm chart

• Setting up monitoring

• Installing Data Center Edition on Kubernetes: Installing on Kubernetes or Openshift