Prerequisites and overview

Prerequisite

You must be able to install Java (Oracle JRE or OpenJDK) on the machine where you plan to run SonarQube.

Hardware requirements

1. A small-scale (individual or small team) instance of the SonarQube server requires at least 2GB of RAM to run efficiently and 1GB of free RAM for the OS. If you are installing an instance for a large team or an enterprise, please consider the additional recommendations below.
2. The amount of disk space you need will depend on how much code you analyze with SonarQube.
3. SonarQube must be installed on hard drives that have excellent read & write performance. Most importantly, the "data" folder houses the Elasticsearch indices on which a huge amount of I/O will be done when the server is up and running. Read and write hard drive performance will therefore have a big impact on the overall SonarQube server performance.
4. SonarQube and the SonarScanner support only 64-bit systems.

Enterprise hardware recommendations

For large teams or enterprise-scale installations of SonarQube, additional hardware is required. At the enterprise level, monitoring your SonarQube instance is essential and should guide further hardware upgrades as your instance grows. A starting configuration should include at least:

• 8 cores, to allow the main SonarQube platform to run with multiple compute engine workers
• 16GB of RAM For additional requirements and recommendations relating to database and Elasticsearch, see Hardware recommendations.

Supported platforms

Java

The SonarQube server requires Java version 17 and the SonarQube scanners require Java version 11 or 17.

SonarQube is able to analyze any kind of Java source files regardless of the version of Java they comply with.

We recommend using the critical patch update (CPU) releases.

Java	Server	Scanners
Oracle JRE	17	17
	11	11
OpenJDK	17	17
	11	11

Database

Database
PostgreSQL	15
	14
	13
	12
	11
	Must be configured to use UTF-8 charset
Microsoft SQL Server	2022 (MSSQL 16.0) with bundled Microsoft JDBC driver. Express Edition is supported.
	2019 (MSSQL Server 15.0) with bundled Microsoft JDBC driver. Express Edition is supported.
	2017 (MSSQL Server 14.0) with bundled Microsoft JDBC driver. Express Edition is supported.
	2016 (MSSQL Server 13.0) with bundled Microsoft JDBC driver. Express Edition is supported.
	2014 (MSSQL Server 12.0) with bundled Microsoft JDBC driver. Express Edition is supported.
	Collation must be case-sensitive (CS) and accent-sensitive (AS) (example: Latin1_General_CS_AS).
	READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT must be set on the SonarQube database to avoid potential deadlocks under heavy load.
	Both Windows authentication (“Integrated Security”) and SQL Server authentication are supported. See the Microsoft SQL Server section in Install the server for instructions on configuring authentication.
Oracle	21C
	19C
	XE Editions
	Must be configured to use a UTF8-family charset (see NLS_CHARACTERSET).
	The driver ojdbc14.jar is not supported.
	We recommend using the latest Oracle JDBC driver.
	Only the thin mode is supported, not OCI.
	Only MAX_STRING_SIZE=STANDARD parameter is supported, not EXTENDED.

Web browser

To get the full experience SonarQube has to offer, you must enable JavaScript in your browser.

Browser
Microsoft Edge	Latest
Mozilla Firefox	Latest
Google Chrome	Latest
Safari	Latest

Platform notes

Linux

If you're running on Linux, you must ensure that:

• vm.max_map_count is greater than or equal to 524288
• fs.file-max is greater than or equal to 131072
• the user running SonarQube can open at least 131072 file descriptors
• the user running SonarQube can open at least 8192 threads

You can see the values with the following commands:

sysctl vm.max_map_count
sysctl fs.file-max
ulimit -n
ulimit -u

You can set them dynamically for the current session by running the following commands as root:

sysctl -w vm.max_map_count=524288
sysctl -w fs.file-max=131072
ulimit -n 131072
ulimit -u 8192

To set these values more permanently, you must update either /etc/sysctl.d/99-sonarqube.conf (or /etc/sysctl.conf as you wish) to reflect these values.

If the user running SonarQube (sonarqube in this example) does not have permission to have at least 131072 open descriptors, you must insert this line in /etc/security/limits.d/99-sonarqube.conf (or /etc/security/limits.conf as you wish):

sonarqube   -   nofile   131072
sonarqube   -   nproc    8192

If you are using systemd to start SonarQube, you must specify those limits inside your unit file in the section [Service] :

[Service]
...
LimitNOFILE=131072
LimitNPROC=8192
...

macOS

Same as for Linux: If you're running into maximum file limit issues on macOS, you can fix them by setting the file limit values by running the following commands:  

sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfiles=131072
sudo sysctl -w kern.maxfilesperproc=131072
ulimit -n 131072

seccomp filter

By default, Elasticsearch uses seccomp filter. In most distributions, this feature is activated in the kernel, however on distributions like Red Hat Linux 6 this feature is deactivated. If you are using a distribution without this feature and you cannot upgrade to a newer version with seccomp activated, you have to explicitly deactivate this security layer by updating sonar.search.javaAdditionalOpts in <SONARQUBE_HOME>/conf/sonar.properties:

sonar.search.javaAdditionalOpts=-Dbootstrap.system_call_filter=false

You can check if seccomp is available on your kernel with:

$ grep SECCOMP /boot/config-$(uname -r)

If your kernel has seccomp, you will see:

CONFIG_HAVE_ARCH_SECCOMP_FILTER=y
CONFIG_SECCOMP_FILTER=y
CONFIG_SECCOMP=y

For more detail, see the Elasticsearch documentation.

Fonts

Generating executive reports requires that fonts be installed on the server hosting SonarQube. On Windows servers, this is a given. However, this is not always the case for Linux servers.

The following should be ensured:

• Fontconfig is installed on the server hosting SonarQube
• A package of FreeType fonts is installed on the SonarQube server. The exact packages available will vary by distribution, but a commonly used package is libfreetype6

FIPS

SonarQube will not run on Linux hosts where FIPS (Federal Information Processing Standard) is enforced.

Azure App Service not supported

While SonarQube is provider agnostic, some environments do not work well as platforms for a SonarQube installation. 

The issue with Azure App Service is linked to the fact that SonarQube's Elasticsearch component runs bootstrap checks on values at startup. This includes the prerequisites for Linux platforms documented above. If the values are too low for any of these properties, the SonarQube startup will fail. These values need to be set on the host system, which Azure does not make possible for this service.