Sonar

Sonar is an open source project hosted at Codehaus . Sonar is well known in the Java Development, since it is a based on the old Maven plugins. Also Sonar no longer is dependent from maven as build tool.

Introduction

Sonar is an open platform to manage code quality. Is looks at 7 axes of code quality:

1. Architecture and design
2. Coding rules
3. Comments
4. Complexity
5. Duplications
6. Potential bugs
7. Unit tests

Sonar is based on the ability of extending by plug-ins principle for covering new language, adding riles engines, computing advanced metrics. In summary:

• More than 50 plug-ing are already available.
• It not only covers Java anymore but also PHP and much more languages (C++, C#, Cobol, Delphi, Drools, Flex, JavaScript, Natural, PHP, Visual Basic, and more...).

Sonar is a web-based application. Rules, alerts, thresholds, exclusions settings cab all be configured online. It is:

• Database storage of (previous) results
• Historical measures can be compared

Requirements

The only pre-requisite is Java 1.5 or higher.

Installation

A description of the installation can be found on the Sonar Website . However this installation focusses on the installation on Apple OS X running MAMP.

1. Download the latest code from the SonarSource downloads page.
2. Uncompress the downloaded file into a directory (i.e. /wwwroot/Sonar). This directory is named SONAR_WWW_HOME.
3. Add the web-settings to $SONAR_WWW_HOME/conf/sonar.properties. Please note that you may have to change this in case you have already used these settings.
   • sonar.web.host: 0.0.0.0
   • sonar.web.port: 8080
   • sonar.web.contect: /sonar
4. Add the database settings to $SONAR_WWW_HOME/conf/sonar.properties.
   • sonar.jdbc.user: sonar
   • sonar.jdbc.password: sonar
5. In MySQL of MAMP do:
   • Create new schema sonar
   • Add user named 'sonar'
   • Add password for user sonar sonar.
6. Very important, uncheck the settings 'Allow local access only in the MySQL-Database settings of MAMP.
7. Execute the following script to start the server:
   • Go to the location where sonar is installed (SONAR_RUNNER_HOME/bin/<YOUR-OS>
   • $ ./sonar.sh start
8. Check the logger of Sonar:
   • $ tail -f -n 50 $SONAR_WWW_HOME/logs/sonar.log
9. In case not errors can be found you can still check:
   • $ ./sonar.sh status
10. Now check sonar by going to the web-url:
    • http://localhost:8080

Installing the client

The possible clients are:

• Sonar runner
• Maven
• Ant
• CI Engine.

If the previous steps are successful you can add the recommended client: Sonar Runner to this installation.

1. Download the runner from Sonar-Runner download webpage.
2. Uncompress the downloaded file into a directory named $SONAR_RUNNER_HOME in the next steps (i.e. /wwwroot/sonar/runner).
3. Update the global settings in file $SONAR_RUNNER_HOME/conf/sonar-runner.properties:
   • Database connection (i.e. MySql, sonar.jdbc.url, sonar.jdbc.driver)
   • Server URL (i.e. sonar.host.url).
4. Create a new SONAR_RUNNER_HOME environment variable set the $SONAR_RUNNER_HOME.
5. Check the basic installation.
   • Open a new shell
   • Execute the command:

$ sonar-runner -h
usage: sonar-runner [options]
 
Options:
 -h,--help             Display help information
 -X,--debug            Produce execution debug output
 -D,--define <arg>     Define property

Adding PHP

For successful sonar-running a PHP projects:

1. Downlaod the PHP jar from sonar
2. Install in the extensions/plugins directory.
3. Stop Sonar
4. Start Sonar

However you need to have installed:

• PHPUnit (PHP Unit testing)
  1. pear channel-discover pear.phpunit.de
  2. pear channel-discover pear.symfony-project.com
  3. pear install phpunit/PHPUnit-3.5.5
• XDebug (for code coverage computation) . Since Apple OS X does not have apt-get utility you need an alternative such as home-brew, but installing with this tools is also no 100%.
  1. apt-get install make
  2. apt-get install php5-dev
  3. pecl install xdebug
  • The best and easy way is to follow Kubishkin's installation method, (Installing PHP Xdebug on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion in the See also).
• pdepended .
  1. Download pdepend using pear (you may have to sudo the commands):
  2. pear channel-discover pear.pdepend.org
  • pear install pdepend/PHP_Depend-beta
• phpmd or PHP Mess Detector installable using pear:
  1. pear channel-discover pear.phpmd.org
  2. pear channel-discover pear.pdepend.org
  3. pear install --alldeps phpmd/PHP_PMD
• phpcs PHP Code Sniffer using pear:
  1. pear install PHP_CodeSniffer-1.5.0RC1

Look at the http://docs.codehaus.org/display/SONAR/PHP+Plugin for more information.

See also

Apple OS X does not have the apt-get utility. An alternative is homebrew .

• HomeBrew Wiki, Documentation on install, faq and usage.

It is more easy to read the following instruction for installing debug

• Kubishkin, Installing PHP Xdebug on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion.

PHP CodeSniffer

• CodeSniffer, Technical Documentation of the PHP CodeSniffer Core Code and the CodeSniffer sniffs.