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SonarQube–The ‘MakeUniqueDir’ task failed unexpectedly

In our efforts to improve the (code) quality of our applications, we started an initiative to get all our teams integrate their projects in SonarQube. We have SonarQube running for a long time inside our organization, but adoption remained fragmented. The initiative turned out quite successful, but as a consequence, we encountered some issues with SonarQube.

Teams started to complain that there build pipelines became flaky and sometimes resulted in errors. The reported error was related to SonarQube and the message was like this:

Error MBS0418: The ‘MakeUniqueDir’ task failed unexpectedly.

System.UnauthorizedAccessException: Access to the path ‘’'db1_work80_sonarqubeout’ is denied.

We found out that the problem was related to our build server setup where we have multiple agents running on the same server. As multiple agents try to execute the ’Prepare Analysis’ task, it sometimes fails with the error message above.

Furher research brought us to the NodeReuse parameter of MSBuild (msbuild.exe -nr:false). Setting this parameter to false don't leave MSBuild.exe processes hanging around (and possibly locking files) after the build completes.

Instead of adapting every build pipeline to pass this parameter, we used the MSBUILDDISABLENODEREUSE=1 environment variable which has the same effect.

Remark: Using this parameter can result in slower builds.

Anyone else who had the same problem?

More information

.NET project | Sonar Documentation

Error MSB4018: The "MakeUniqueDir" task failed unexpectedly - SonarQube Server / Community Build - Sonar Community

MakeUniqueDir task fails intermittently on build agents · Issue #1565 · SonarSource/sonar-scanner-msbuild

msbuild/documentation/wiki/MSBuild-Tips-&-Tricks.md at main · dotnet/msbuild

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