Custom nuget.exe for TFS 2015 build

Mario Majcica November 2, 2016 7 Comments

Introduction

I had a couple of users complaining about not being able to restore a specific version of AutoMapper package during their build. A quick search showed me that they are not the only one facing this issues and that this is quite a common problem. I verified that I’m able to reproduce this issue and I saw that it is presented based on the version of nuget client. As by default the build agent does use the nuget.exe that ships with the agent itself, I verified the version of it and saw that in my case (TFS 2015.3) it is 3.2.1.10581. With the 3.2.1.10581 version of nuget client I was unable to restore the package in question (AutoMapper.5.1.1) meanwhile from Visual Studio with version 3.4.3.855 all went well. The error I could see in the log is the following:

##[error]Unable to find version '5.1.1' of package 'AutoMapper'.

Without digging into details of why this is happening, I’ll show you how to push your build to use a different version of a nuget client.

Preparing the build server

As a first thing, let’s “install” the latest nuget version on our build server. Just download the latest version of nuget client and place it in a folder of your choice. Make sure that account on which your build agent is running has sufficient rights to access that path. For me it will be ‘D:\Program Files(x86)\Nuget‘.
Once placed your nuget.exe in the above mentioned folder, let’s add a system environment variable that will point to this executable. Open Control Panel > System and Security > System and choose Advanced system settings. In System properties dialog click Environment variables button and add a new System variable by click the new button (and be sure it is a System property and not a user variable). As a variable name choose NugetPath and as value set the path towards your nuget.exe file, which in my case is D:\Program Files(x86)\Nuget\nuget.exe

Now you should restart your agent services so that the new system variable is picked up by the agents. If everything went well you should see the following capability in the agent capability list:

If you can see it listed correctly, it all went well till now.

Setting up the build

Now it’s the time for the build. I suppose you are using the NuGet Installer build step in order to restore your packages before the build. If not, you should, as resorting the packages from Visual Studio Build step is obsolete and should not be used.
In order to force NuGet Installer build step to use our new nuget client, we need to expand the Advance group settings and set the Path to NuGet.exe option value to $(NuGetPath):

Once this is done, just to be sure that only the build agents having the custom nuget version installed will be used, we are going also to specify a demand for our build. In the general tab of you build definition add new demand of type exists and set it to NuGetPath:

Now, queue a new build and check in the log file that our new nuget client is used instead of the default one that ships with the build agent. You should find a similar line in your log:

D:\Program Files (x86)\NuGet\nuget.exe restore "E:\a1\_work\29\s\SimpleWebProject.sln" -NoCache -NonInteractive

That’s all folks, an easy way to push you build to use a specific version of the NuGet client instead of the default one.

Upgrading SonarQube to a newer version

Mario Majcica November 1, 2016 1 Comments

This, as my other SonarQube guides, are meant for developers who are “improvising” system administrators. It is a detailed and comprehensive guide facing real life situations. As the upgrade guide on SonarQube documentation website is not, in my opinion, clear enough, I’ll try to describe the necessary steps in doing the upgrade. Specifically I will perform the upgrade from the SonarQube version 5.6 to SonarQube version 6.0. However this guide may be valid also for different version updates (or at least a part of it).

As I already have upgraded to the LTS version and there are no other LTS version available in my upgrade path, I can proceed with my simple upgrade. If you are not in this situation, please first check if there is an LTS version released in between your version and the one you intend to upgrade to, then first upgrade to the LTS version following this guide, then to your final version of choice. The steps that follow will be pretty much the same for both of the upgrades.

Preparation

Ideally you followed the instructions in my previous post about installing and configuring SonarQube. I will give for granted that SonarQube is replaying on the port 80 and that you do need to get through proxy for what concerns the internet access. If this is not your case, just keep present this information.

Download first the interested version of SonarQube at http://www.sonarqube.org/downloads/.

Extract the contents of the downloaded zip file in the folder of your choice. I usually do have a folder containing multiple version of the software, like shown in the following image:

Now, before going any further it is wise to check if the community reported any issues in regard to the interested versions of software or about any of the plugins.
This is for sure the case for SonarQube 6.0.
It seems that the authentication interface is changed in SonarQube 6.0 in order to phase out some old software components, thus if you were using LDAP plugin, SSO will not work as expected. You can read further about this issue in a separate post of mine, SonarQube LDAP plugin: a love story

If you can live with eventual issues, proceed with the upgrade. Otherwise you will need to wait for another version hoping that your issue is going to be addressed and solved.

Another important thing is to follow the upgrade path. If not you may face different issues with the database upgrade. I saw many posts in which people didn’t followed the upgrade path and they were facing issues reporting problems with database collation etc.
One of most common ones is the following exception:

2016.09.28 18:23:57 ERROR web[o.s.s.d.m.DatabaseMigrator] Fail to execute database migration: org.sonar.db.version.v60.CleanUsurperRootComponents com.microsoft.sqlserver.jdbc.SQLServerException: Cannot resolve the collation conflict between "Latin1_General_CS_AS" and "SQL_Latin1_General_CP1_CS_AS" in the equal to operation.

This is due to the fact that people haven’t followed the upgrade path. In case you are running a version 5.x prior to the 5.6.x, please follow the upgrade path. This may sound confusing and people other jump over it in the SonarQube documentation. Thing is simple, if in between your version and the version you are trying to upgrade, there is an LTS (Long Term Supported) version of software being published, you first need to upgrade to the LTS version (or multiple upgrades in case you are running an really old version of SonarQube) then you will be able to upgrade to your version of choice.

Upgrading

Always backup your database before proceeding with the upgrade!

First and important thing is to start your new version of SonarQube as a separate instance. This is wise so that you can install and upgrade all of the plugins you need before actually upgrading your database and start using the new version.
Now before starting it, let check a couple of things. Open the sonar.properties configuration file that resides in the conf folder (of your new version 6.0). As I have opted for running SonarQube on port 80, I can stick with the default port and no change there will be necessary so that my services do not clash. Still there is one port more that we need to take care of and that is Elasticsearch. Default port for Elasticsearch is 9001 and if we do try to start another instance of SonarQube on the same machine, an error will be thrown.

Unfortunately we would not be able to see clearly what happened only from the error message shown in console. However in the log file you will find a BindTransportException: Failed to bind to [9001].
Because of this, in sonar.properties file find the sonar.search.port=9001 line, which by the way should be commented out. Remove the hash sign to uncomment it and change the port to 9002.
If you are behind the proxy do not forget to add the relevant settings as described in my previous post.
Once you set all up, you are ready to start in parallel the new instance on SonarQube. Open the command prompt and move do bin\windows-x86-64 folder, the launch StartSonar.bat. If all went well the last message you will see in the console will state Process[ce] is up. Now navigate to localhost:9000 and you should be able to see the new instance home page:

As you can see from the message in the bottom of the page, it started by using the embedded database. No worries about that. Log in as administrator with usual admin/admin credentials and move to the Update center. Here now install all of the plugins you are using in your previous version and update the default ones to the latest available version. Once installed, restart it by using the restart it WITHOUT using the restart button. The restart button only works in case you installed it as a service and not if you run it from the console. In this case a CTRL + C in the console window will stop your instance, then start it again in the same way.

If you had other plugins that are installed and are not available in the update center, as it may be for your own custom plugin, install them manually and restart SonarQube to check that they are compatible with the new version. You will find them in extensions\plugins folder. A copy paste will be sufficient.
Once restarted, open the new versions home page again and check that the manually installed plugins are visible and that there are no errors in the log.

Now we are ready to proceed with the real upgrade. Make sure that all of the settings are equal, both in the sonar.properties files and wrapper.conf file. Once done, stop the service of the previous version and remove it. In console, move to the bin\windows-x86-64 folder and run the StopNTService.bat, then UninstallNTService.bat. Now the old instance of SonarQube is not running any more.

You can now install the service of the new version and start it. Move to the bin\windows-x86-64 folder of your 6.0 version and run InstallNTService.bat.

Note: If you were using a specific account to run your service, make sure that it is set correctly again and restart SonarQube. Otherwise you may face issues with the db upgrade.

Once started, on the server navigate to the http://localhost/setup to start the upgrade procedure. In this step, SonarQube will apply the necessary changes to the database. Again, be sure that you have a backup of your database before proceeding.
This is the page you should see:

Click on the upgrade button and wait.

If case everything went well, soon you will be shown the database is up to date page which means that upgrade went well.

Congrats, your upgrade succeeded.
You will now be redirected to the homepage and you can again start using your SonarQube instance.

In case you get to see this

it means that something went wrong. Unfortunately you will not get much from this page, and in order to check what actually went wrong, you will need to dig into the log file.

Considerations

It is always wise to test the upgrade first in a clone of your production environment. As for many other things make sure you DR strategy is in place before upgrading.

SonarQube LDAP plugin: a love story

Mario Majcica October 24, 2016 4 Comments

It is been a while, since I struggled more then with the recent changes with the SonarQube LDAP plugin.
As I have already mentioned in my previous post, how to configure LDAP with your SonarQube instance, I’ll share with you what I experienced in the recent changes that affected the LDAP plugin.

Introduction

It all started with my upgrade of SonarQube from version 5.5 to version 5.6. With the version 5.6 the support for the LDAP plugin version 1.5.1 (which I was using) was dropped and based on compatibility matrix, we are forced to used the new 2.0 version of LDAP plugin. But wait, if we are using the Microsoft Active Directory as our LDAP directory (which I do), the documentation is pointing us towards a new, spin off, plugin called Active Directory Plugin. You can get more information about this at the official documentation page of LDAP plugin here http://docs.sonarqube.org/display/PLUG/LDAP+Plugin.
Considering this an advised practice, I decided to abandon the LDAP plugin in favor of the newcomer.
In the next paragraph I’ll show you how did my configuration changed in case you got here with the intention to achieve the same.

Just to conclude my story in regard to the LDAP integration and SonarQube upgrades. My plan went well until I decided to upgrade SonarQube again to the next new version, 6.0 in my case. I was surprised to understand that the new Active Directory Plugin was not compatible with the version 6.0 of SonarQube and that if I was keen to keep LDAP integration in place I would need to turn back to LDAP 2.0 plugin.
Not only, I also came to understand that SSO is not supported anymore. This means that my users from now on will need to type in the username and password. Hopefully the following feature will become available soon, which would solve all of these issues, https://jira.sonarsource.com/browse/SONAR-5430. As soon ready, I will write a blog post about it.

From 5.5 to 5.6

If you were using the LDAP plugin version 1.5.1 on SonarQube version 5.2-5.5 and you followed my guide in this post, your current configuration should look like this:


#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# LDAP

sonar.security.realm=LDAP
sonar.authenticator.downcase=true

Now moving towards the Active Directory plugin you need to change it to look like this:


#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# LDAP

sonar.security.realm=ACTIVE_DIRECTORY
sonar.authenticator.downcase=true

This change is sufficient to keep your LDAP integration working.

Before making this change in your configuration make sure that Active Directory plugin is installed.

You will not find the Active Directory Plugin in the Update Center. You need to download it here and install it manually (by placing the sonar-activedirectory-plugin-1.0.jar file into the extensions\plugins folder.

From 5.6 to 6.0 (and beyond)

Now the hard part. If you upgrade from your 5.6.x version to 6.0, the plugin that we just started using, will not be supported anymore. Also the SSO will not work no matter the plugin you are using. If you are planning to achieve the LDAP integration, you will have no other choice than get using the LDAP plugin version 2.0 again. In that case you LDAP configuration needs to change quite drastically. I’ll show you an example and then I’ll explain the various settings and how you should adapt it for your case.


#----------------------------------------------------------------------
# LDAP

ldap.group.baseDn=ou=Groups,dc=my,dc=domain,dc=com
ldap.group.request=(&(objectClass=group)(member={dn}))
ldap.group.idAttribute=sAMAccountName

Let’s check the different settings and try to explain them.

If you now have set the necessary for your domain, you should be able to log in SonarQube. Be aware however that your user id is going to be changed same as for your groups. Probably you will need to use the local admin account to setup the new group names and assign the correct Global Permissions. Check my previous blog post on how to achieve that here, SonarQube on Windows and MS SQL.
This also means that if you have issues assigned to users and other user related information, they would be lost. I tried changing some of these values manually in database, however I was not successful. As soon as I do get more information about migrating user profiles, I will create a separate blog post on that.

After you set up everything as I suggested, you still may encounter some issues. If you can’t log in check your log file and see if you have any similar lines in it:
You can't sign up because email 'Mario.Majcica@mydomain.com' is already used by an existing user.
If this is the case you need to deactivate the previous user from Administration > Security > Users panel (log in as admin) or modify a relevant records in you DB in table users.

Update

Meanwhile writing this blog post, a newer version of SonarQube and LDAP plugin became available (SonarQube 6.1 and LDAP plugin 2.1). There are no braking changes and all of the above should work the same.