How to make sonar-scanner just download plug-ins

[jan.schatz]

Hi,

we are using SonarQube Developer Edition version 9.9.1 (build 69595) and sonar-scanner-4.8.0.2856.

I noticed that sonar-scanner downloads a lot of plug-ins when running the first analysis. We are working in a devcontainer, so I would like to move this step of downloading the plug-ins to the build stage of the container. How can I achieve that?

My closest approach by now is this:

export SONAR_HOST_URL=...
export SONAR_TOKEN=...
/opt/sonar-scanner-4.8.0.2856/bin/sonar-scanner -X | tee >(grep "You must define the following mandatory properties for 'Unknown': sonar.projectKey")

Like this sonar-scanner will download the plug-ins and then emit an error, because the project key is not set. I artificially fix the exit code of the command by grepping for the expected error message. It works, but it is kind of dirty.
Is there a better approach?

[ganncamp (G Ann Campbell)]

Hi,

Welcome to the community!

You might be interested in the approach discussed here:

Does Sonar scanner have a fixed timeout when downloading plugins?

We run our workloads on ephemeral containers so to reduce the amount of downloads over the Internet we use a cache file (local to our network) to pre-download the plugins onto our containers before calling the sonar runner. I recommend you do something similar so that you are less likely to hit timeout or other similar issues from fetching binaries over the Internet. If the cache is not up to date the runner will then download the correct binaries as needed and the next cache refresh should get …

 
HTH,
Ann

[jan.schatz]

Thanks, Ann, I joined in on this thread.