Sonar cannot start once updated to macOS Catalina. Error as “wrapper” cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified

SonarQube
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Welcome to the community !

Indeed, macOS Catalina is stricter about running softwares you’ve downloaded that are not signed by an official Apple dev license. You will get similar issues with other downloaded software.

Several options here, from the more specific to the more general :

  • Allow only this executable file : Run SonarQube again, then go System Preferences -> Security & Privacy, and in the General tab you will see at the bottom the executable that was recently blocked. From this, you can clic open anyway.

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Next time you run SonarQube you will be prompted for a definitive approval :

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  • Allow any executable run from the Terminal : go System Preferences -> Security & Privacy, and in the Privacy tab, scroll in the list for Developer Tools, check the Terminal app. Then restart the Terminal App and re-run your command.
  • Allow all downloaded app : sudo spctl --master-disable to allow apps downloaded from Anywhere. Be careful with that choice.

Under the hood, macOS enforce to place a quarantine flag com.apple.quarantine on :

  • downloaded files with a quarantine-aware application like Safari, Firefox or Chrome
  • extracted files from an archive with application like Archive Utility or macOS tar or zip
  • file created with an application that has LSFileQuarantineEnabled set to true in the Info.plist

You can see this flag by running this on the downloaded file/folder:

  • on the downloaded zip : xattr -p com.apple.quarantine sonarqube-8.0.zip
  • or on the unzipped files : xattr -p com.apple.quarantine sonarqube-8.0/bin/macosx-universal-64/wrapper

That will prompt something like :
0081;5da594f6;Chrome;A9A2B7E9-B323-4735-81EB-A8F13F892031

Which give you the name of the App that set the flag, and as a first value an hexadecimal field describing the GateKeeper score on that file. If you manually allow the wrapper with the 1 method i described, you will see this value updated.

You can remove programmatically this flag with :

  • xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /path/to/sonarqube-8.0/

-d is for delete, -r for recursively in the folder.

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