Setting Quality Profile via VSTS/TFS Build for SonarQube

Sonar analysis helps to identify the technical debt in the source code of your project. Running it integrated with VSTS or TFS builds add more value by automating the quality checks with sonar server. You can define your own custom Quality Profile to analyze your source code with selected set of rules. Let’s look at how you can specify the Quality Profile with the TFS/VSTS build task, that can be used to automate scanning of your code, when using the SonarQube extension in the visual studio marketplace.

Sonar Server on Azure VM

SonraQube has become grate tool providing detail analysis of code quality. Tracing of history of code quality checks let the development teams identify how the code quality improved (could be how the code is gotten so bad even). How to setup a SonarQube server to use with team foundation server is described in the post “Setting Up Sonar Server for TFS”. Let’s look at steps required to set this up in an Azure virtual machine and expose it to use with team services account.

1. Setup an Azure virtual machine with Windows Server 2012 R2 Datacenter.
2. Follow the instructions in the post  “Setting Up Sonar Server for TFS” and get the SonarQube server running inside the virtual machine.
3. To allow accessing the Sonar server default port 9000 through firewall of the virtual machine add an inbound firewall rule in the virtual machine allowing port 9000 for public and private access.
4. Above step alone will not allow public access to Azure VM hosted sonar server. You need to allow accessibility in Azure nsg(network security group) for the port. To do this go to the virtual machine in Azure portal, select Network Interfaces and click on the network interface.

SonarQube Extension for VSTS/TFS

In the post Setup SonarQube Analysis with TFS Builds usage of Sonar Server with TFS build to measure quality of code is explained. The task catalogue tasks explained in the post Setup SonarQube Analysis with TFS Builds are now deprecated. There is an extension available in marketplace for SonarQube. This extension provide new begin analysis and end analysis tasks to be used in a TFS build.
Once you install the SonarQube extension for VSTS/TFS you can setup service endpoint type of SonarQube.

Setup SonarQube Analysis with TFS Builds

Setting up a Sonarqube server is explained in the post “Setting Up Sonar Server for TFS”.  Sonar analysis helps to identify the technical debt in the source code of your project. Running it integrated with team service or TFS builds add more value by automating the quality checks with sonar server.

To run Sonarqube analysis for a project with TFS follow the steps described below.

Setting Up Sonar Server for TFS

SonarQube helps to check overall health of your source code.This allows you to write cleaner code and it will improve your code base dramatically. SonarQube is capable of integrating into CI engines and facilitate DevOps by providing code quality measurements. It supports multiple languages and makes it easy for you to detects bugs in your code. Qaulity management of your code bases can be centralized and integration with TFS server and Team services is seamless. Lets look at setting up a SonarQube server to be used with TFS.