GitLab integration

SonarQube's integration with GitLab Self-Managed and GitLab.com allows you to maintain code quality and security in your GitLab projects.

With this integration, you'll be able to:

• Authenticate with GitLab: Sign in to SonarQube with your GitLab credentials.
• Import your GitLab projects: Import your GitLab Projects into SonarQube to easily set up SonarQube projects.
• Analyze projects with GitLab CI/CD: Integrate analysis into your build pipeline. Starting in Developer Edition, SonarScanners running in GitLab CI/CD jobs can automatically detect branches or merge requests being built so you don't need to specifically pass them as parameters to the scanner.
• Add merge request decoration: (starting in Developer Edition) See your quality gate and code metric results right in GitLab so you know if it's safe to merge your changes.

Prerequisites

Integration with GitLab self-managed subscriptions requires at least GitLab version 11.7.

Branch analysis

Community Edition doesn't support the analysis of multiple branches, so you can only analyze your main branch. Starting in Developer Edition, you can analyze multiple branches and merge requests.

Authenticating with GitLab

You can delegate authentication to GitLab using a dedicated GitLab OAuth application.

Creating a GitLab OAuth app

You can find general instructions for creating a GitLab OAuth app here.

Specify the following settings in your OAuth app:

• Name: your app's name, such as SonarQube.
• Redirect URI: enter your SonarQube URL with the path /oauth2/callback/gitlab. For example, https://sonarqube.mycompany.com/oauth2/callback/gitlab.
• Scopes: select api if you plan to enable group synchronization. Select read_user if you only plan to delegate authentication.

After saving your application, GitLab takes you to the app's page. Here you find your Application ID and Secret. Keep these handy, open your SonarQube instance, and navigate to Administration > Configuration > General Settings > ALM Integrations > GitLab > Authentication. Set the following settings to finish setting up GitLab authentication:

• Enabled: set to true.
• Application ID: the Application ID is found on your GitLab app's page.
• Secret: the Secret is found on your GitLab app's page.

On the login form, the new "Log in with GitLab" button allows users to connect with their GitLab accounts.

GitLab group synchronization

Enable Synchronize user groups at Administration > Configuration > General Settings > ALM Integrations > GitLab to associate GitLab groups with existing SonarQube groups of the same name. GitLab users inherit membership to subgroups from parent groups.

To synchronize a GitLab group or subgroup with a SonarQube group, name the SonarQube group with the full path of the GitLab group or subgroup URL.

For example, with the following GitLab group setup:

• GitLab group = My Group
• GitLab subgroup = My Subgroup
• GitLab subgroup URL = https://YourGitLabURL.com/my-group/my-subgroup

You should name your SonarQube group my-group to synchronize it with your GitLab group and my-group/my-subgroup to synchronize it with your GitLab subgroup.

Importing your GitLab projects into SonarQube

Setting up the import of GitLab projects into SonarQube allows you to easily create SonarQube projects from your GitLab projects. If you're using Developer Edition or above, this is also the first step in adding merge request decoration.

To set up the import of GitLab projects:

1. Set your global settings
2. Add a personal access token for importing repositories

Setting your global settings

To import your GitLab projects into SonarQube, you need to first set your global SonarQube settings. Navigate to Administration > Configuration > General Settings > ALM Integrations, select the GitLab tab, and specify the following settings:

• Configuration Name (Enterprise and Data Center Edition only): The name used to identify your GitLab configuration at the project level. Use something succinct and easily recognizable.
• GitLab URL: The GitLab API URL.
• Personal Access Token: A GitLab user account is used to decorate Merge Requests. We recommend using a dedicated GitLab account with at least Reporter permissions (the account needs permission to leave comments). Use a personal access token from this account with the api scope authorized for the repositories you're analyzing. This personal access token is used to report your quality gate status to your merge requests. You'll be asked for another personal access token for importing projects in the following section.

Adding a personal access token for importing projects

After setting these global settings, you can add a project from GitLab by clicking the Add project button in the upper-right corner of the Projects homepage and selecting GitLab.

Then, you'll be asked to provide a personal access token with read_api scope so SonarQube can access and list your GitLab projects. This token will be stored in SonarQube and can be revoked at any time in GitLab.

After saving your personal access token, you'll see a list of your GitLab projects that you can set up to add to SonarQube. Setting up your projects this way also sets your project settings for merge request decoration.

For information on analyzing your projects with GitLab CI/CD, see the following section.

Analyzing projects with GitLab CI/CD

SonarScanners running in GitLab CI/CD jobs can automatically detect branches or merge requests being built so you don't need to specifically pass them as parameters to the scanner.

To analyze your projects with GitLab CI/CD, you need to:

• Set your environment variables.
• Configure your gilab-ci.yml file.

The following sections detail these steps.

Setting environment variables

You can set environment variables securely for all pipelines in GitLab's settings. See GitLab's documentation on CI/CD variables for more information.

You need to set the following environment variables in GitLab for analysis:

• Sonar Token: Generate a SonarQube token for GitLab and create a custom environment variable in GitLab with SONAR_TOKEN as the Key and the token you generated as the Value.
• Sonar Host URL: Create a custom environment variable with SONAR_HOST_URL as the Key and your SonarQube server URL as the Value.

Configuring your gitlab-ci.yml file

This section shows you how to configure your GitLab CI/CD gitlab-ci.yml file. The allow_failure parameter in the examples allows a job to fail without impacting the rest of the CI suite.

You'll set up your build according to your SonarQube edition:

• Community Edition: Community Edition doesn't support multiple branches, so you should only analyze your main branch. You can restrict the analysis to your main branch by adding the branch name to the only parameter in your .yml file.
• Developer Edition and above: By default, GitLab will build all branches but not merge requests. To build merge requests, you need to update the .gitlab-ci.yml file by adding merge_requests to the only parameter in your .yml. See the example configurations below for more information.

Select the scanner you're using below to expand an example configuration:

sonarqube-check:
  image: gradle:jre11-slim
  variables:
    SONAR_USER_HOME: "${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/.sonar"  # Defines the location of the analysis task cache
    GIT_DEPTH: "0"  # Tells git to fetch all the branches of the project, required by the analysis task
  cache:
    key: "${CI_JOB_NAME}"
    paths:
      - .sonar/cache
  script: gradle sonarqube -Dsonar.qualitygate.wait=true
  allow_failure: true
  only:
    - merge_requests
    - master
    - develop

sonarqube-check:
  image: maven:3.6.3-jdk-11
  variables:
    SONAR_USER_HOME: "${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/.sonar"  # Defines the location of the analysis task cache
    GIT_DEPTH: "0"  # Tells git to fetch all the branches of the project, required by the analysis task
  cache:
    key: "${CI_JOB_NAME}"
    paths:
      - .sonar/cache
  script:
    - mvn verify sonar:sonar -Dsonar.qualitygate.wait=true
  allow_failure: true
  only:
    - merge_requests
    - master
    - develop

sonarqube-check:
  image:
    name: sonarsource/sonar-scanner-cli:latest
    entrypoint: [""]
  variables:
    SONAR_USER_HOME: "${CI_PROJECT_DIR}/.sonar"  # Defines the location of the analysis task cache
    GIT_DEPTH: "0"  # Tells git to fetch all the branches of the project, required by the analysis task
  cache:
    key: "${CI_JOB_NAME}"
    paths:
      - .sonar/cache
  script:
    - sonar-scanner -Dsonar.qualitygate.wait=true
  allow_failure: true
  only:
    - merge_requests
    - master
    - develop

Failing the pipeline job when the quality gate fails

In order for the quality gate to fail on the GitLab side when it fails on the SonarQube side, the scanner needs to wait for the SonarQube quality gate status. To enable this, set the sonar.qualitygate.wait=true parameter in the .gitlab-ci.yml file.

You can set the sonar.qualitygate.timeout property to an amount of time (in seconds) that the scanner should wait for a report to be processed. The default is 300 seconds.

For more information

For more information on configuring your build with GitLab CI/CD, see the GitLab CI/CD pipeline configuration reference.

Adding merge request decoration to GitLab

Merge request decoration shows your Quality Gate and analysis metrics directly in GitLab.

After you've set up SonarQube to import your GitLab projects as shown in the previous section, the simplest way to add merge request decoration is by adding a project from GitLab by clicking the Add project button in the upper-right corner of the Projects homepage and selecting GitLab.

Then, follow the steps in SonarQube to analyze your project. The project settings for merge request decoration are set automatically.

Adding merge request decoration to a manually created or existing project

To add merge request decoration to a manually created or existing project, make sure your global ALM Integration settings are set as shown in the Importing your GitLab projects into SonarQube section above, and set the following project settings at Project Settings > General Settings > Pull Request Decoration:

• Configuration name: The configuration name that corresponds to your GitLab instance.
• Project ID: your GitLab Project ID found in GitLab

Advanced merge request decoration configuration