Maven plugin sonar-maven-plugin is not compatible with Java 17

[Davio (Dave Franken)]

This has been checked with the latest sonar-maven-plugin version 3.9.1.2184.

Given a project which generates Java 17 bytecode, by using 17 for the Maven compiler plugin, analyzing the project with the sonar-maven-plugin scanner will activate the Findbugs plugin and yields the following errors:

java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Unsupported class file major version 61

After some research, I found that the sonar-maven-plugin uses version 4.0.3 of the sonar-findbugs-plugin internally.

This issue is supposedly fixed in spotbugs version 4.2.2 and later, see https://giters.com/spotbugs/spotbugs/issues/1570. This newer version of spotbugs is used in sonar-findbugs-plugin version 4.0.4 and later, see When will sporbugs version 4.4.0 be supported? · Issue #376 · spotbugs/sonar-findbugs · GitHub

As of this writing, the latest version of the sonar-findbugs-plugin is 4.0.5
I am confident that updating the plugin to this version will enable Java 17 compatibility.

[Colin]

@Davio

After some research, I found that the sonar-maven-plugin uses version 4.0.3 of the sonar-findbugs-plugin internally.

This is not quite true – the maven plugin doesn’t use the (community-supported) Findbugs plugins at all, but if a SonarQube server has the findbugs plugin installed, then the scanner will attempt to use it during analysis.

So you would need to update the plugin on your SonarQube server.