Automagically setting the project version for Go projects in SonarQube

On one of my recent Go side projects, micropub-go, I've been using the wonderful SonarQube for visibility of code quality issues.

As my first real Go project, let alone first with SonarQube, it's been a bit of fun learning how to get it set up correctly with all the Go tools, but I've managed to get it into a good place.

However today, I noticed that my SonarQube quality scans showed ~800 lines of "New Code" since the previous release. This was odd, because the last release was a couple of hours prior, and there definitely wasn't that much code added.

It turns out that this is due to the way that SonarQube cannot auto-detect the version of the project i.e. via Git tags.

This requires we manually set in our sonar-project.properties:

sonar.projectVersion=0.1

Unfortunately this means that to make a release, I'd have to bump the version in that file, instead of just doing a git tag, and I didn't really want to do that, and as there is no other way of tracking the version, I wanted to look at an alternative.

As I use GitLab CI, I came up with the following tweak, which sets the version dynamically:

sonarcloud-check:
  stage: build
  image:
    name: sonarsource/sonar-scanner-cli:latest
    entrypoint: [""]
  script:
    - .ci/set-version.sh # this is the new one
    - sonar-scanner

Based on the script .ci/set-version.sh:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
if [[ -n "$CI_COMMIT_TAG" ]]; then
  echo -e "\nsonar.projectVersion=$CI_COMMIT_TAG" >> sonar-project.properties
else
  echo -e "\nsonar.projectVersion=latest" >> sonar-project.properties
fi

Notice that this uses the CI_COMMIT_TAG, which is only set on tags, so we can make sure that the tag builds set quality scans for that specific version, and otherwise the latest is used for any other references.

This then correctly registers the "New Code" measurement, and gives visibility on issues introduced since the last Git tag.