After installing a new SonarQube version on one our Windows Server VM’s, I encountered some issues. Let me walk you through the problems I encountered and how I fixed them.
Issue 1 - java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError
After I extracted the SonarQube binaries I opened the installation folder, went to the bin\windows-x86-64 folder and tried to run the startsonar.bat file. This failed with the following error message:
D:\sonar\bin\windows-x86-64>startsonar
Starting SonarQube...
Error: LinkageError occurred while loading main class org.sonar.application.App
java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: org/sonar/application/App has been compiled by a more recent version of the Java Runtime (class file version 61.0), this version of the Java Runtime only recognizes class file versions up to 55.0
The error above is related to the class file version. Each JDK release comes with its class file version. Class files are backward compatible but files compiled for newer JDK releases cannot be executed and will result in an UnsupportedClassVersionError
as I learned here.
So I needed a least Java 17 to make SonarQube work.
I wanted to avoid the Oracle JDK (due to their license changes) and decided to install the Microsoft build of the OpenJDK. Yes, Microsoft made their own build of the OpenJDK.
I downloaded and installed the latest version(because the latest version is always better right?).
As a last step I updated the SONAR_JAVA_PATH variable to point to this new installation:
setx SONAR_JAVA_PATH "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\jdk-21.0.3\bin\java.exe"
Issue 2 - java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException
Now when I tried to run SonarQube, it failed again however with a different error message:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: The Security Manager is deprecated and will be removed in a future release
at java.base/java.lang.System.setSecurityManager(System.java:430)
at org.sonar.process.PluginSecurityManager.restrictPlugins(PluginSecurityManager.java:42)
at org.sonar.server.app.WebSecurityManager.apply(WebSecurityManager.java:47)
at org.sonar.server.app.WebServer.main(WebServer.java:101)
Turns out that SonarQube is using a feature that was marked deprecated in Java 17 and was removed in Java 21. So I uninstalled the OpenJDK 21 and instead installed the OpenJDK 17 version.
Don’t forget to update the path:
setx SONAR_JAVA_PATH "C:\Program Files\Microsoft\jdk-17.0.11\bin\java.exe"