Issues not showing up - solved by deleting $HOME/.sonarlint folder

  • Operating system: macOS Sonoma 14.7
  • SonarLint plugin version: v4.10.0
  • Programming language you’re coding in: Java
  • Is connected mode used: no

And a thorough description of the problem / question:
No SonarLint issues were showing up. Neither in editors, nor in the “PROBLEMS” view.
In the SonarLint output, there were entries like “Analysis detected 6 issues and 0 Security Hotspots in 90ms”. So it seemed to work in the backend, but nothing reached the UI. I tried re-installing SonarLint, disable other Lint-related extensions, etc. Nothing helped.
So I kept examining the SonarLint output and there was some exception like “restoring local-only issue database failed: Unknown cipher” or something like that. It pointed to the $HOME/.sonarlint folder. In that folder, there were thousands of .sonarlinttmp_ files and known-findings-store directories.
So I uninstalled the extension, closed VS Code, deleted the $HOME/.sonarlint folder, and installed the SonarLint extension again. Everything works fine again now.

Sorry for not being able to provide details on the error state logs, they’re gone. I just wanted to “put this out there”. The workaround with deleting the folder would have saved me a couple of hours, so I thought it might help others potentially.

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Hello @Henning_Jay, thank you very much for your post, it is really in the spirit of Community - helping each other and is greatly appreciated! :bowing_woman:

I am only replying to clarify that indeed

  • “restoring local-only issue database failed: Unknown cipher” log line indicates that the SonarLint issue storage has been corrupted, and the way to fix it is to remove $HOME/.sonarlint/known-findings-store-* folders and restart.
  • We are aware of the issue concerning the growing size of the .sonarlint/ folder and have recently made a change to clean up the storage every 7 days (instead of 21 days currently). The change will be included in the upcoming release of SonarLint for VSCode (v4.11).

Thanks again for your post, and if you face any other problems with SonarLint or simply have some improvement ideas, please do not hesitate to let us know; we try our best to make the product experience as smooth as possible for everyone! :bowing_woman:

All the best,
Sophio :sunflower:

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