how-to documentation woefully,woefully poor

[txpokey]

There desperately needs to be a reference application to show just how the heck to use this plugin.

... And for my purposes, I want to see that application built via gradle. A good example of what I'd at least like to see is found here for an aspectj plugin.

So when you go to the README.md there is no example on how to actually use this plugin (e.g.) in a gradle project. Historically, since at least release 1.4, there is no suggestion for the apply statement that matches up with

classpath group: 'org.sonarsource.groovy', name: 'sonar-groovy-plugin', version: '1.4'

in your buildscript block. IMHO your user community should not have to guess.

I picked 1.4 since that version is on Maven Central, whereas 1.6 is not. (Presumably because there was a Sonar business decision not to support groovy in 2019.) But whether it's 1.4 or 1.6, the problem is the same.

And given that this 1.6 release is not in Maven Central, it would help to explain how folks can down load this client-side plugin into their local maven repo, and how to configure gradle to look into that local repo to find the plugin.

For example, why let your users guess -- as I currently am -- that this article shows the solution on the "install plugin" pragmatic: i.e., Guide to installing 3rd party JARs. Esp since there's old old documentation to suggest that a server side plugin needed installation in a long distant past. It would be nice to prevent confusion here by simply spelling it out.

Then the entire README.md is moot as to what configuration -- if any -- is really required for Cobertura, JoCoCO, CodeNarc, GMetric.

Likewise, there is no CLI examples or a reference to link some documentation on sonar-scanner. At least your users should not have to hunt to find this link on sonar-scanner. But I should add that there's no real examples there either on how to run and what to expect from running sonar-scanner.

And for the time being, I will wrap my initial observations, by stating what I thought might be useful: confirming the conventions this plugin is using as to finding groovy source, groovy test code (since the sonar plug-in per se runs the tests by default), whether Junit, spock or testNG is supported, configuring where the sonar server is running (and which port its on), and how to over-ride these defaults.

Plus, it might be useful to point to documentation on how to run this scan against the latest docker image. As that's how I'm testing it.

[TobiX]

This is not a Gradle or Maven plugin, but a SonarQube plugin - You only need to install it into SonarQube. It integrates with build tools via the sonar-scanner. That is also the reason why it isn't on Maven Central: It doesn't need to be - Installing it via the SonarQube marketplace is all you need to do to make use of it. Please be aware that development has moved to https://github.com/Inform-Software/sonar-groovy - I'm not actively monitoring this bug tracker for new issues.