Getting Started

Installation

The easiest way to install the SonarLint plugin is to search the marketplace from the IDE.

Go to File > Settings:

Then select the Plugins > Marketplace tab:

Then click OK and restart the IDE to finalize the installation.

You can now enjoy SonarLint!

Offline installation

In case you want to install SonarLint offline, you need to first get access to the plugin zip file.

You can download official versions on the marketplace, or sometimes an ad-hoc version can be built mainly for debugging purposes when a user reports a bug on our community forum.

To install the zip, you can go to File > Settings > Plugins, click on the wheel at the right, then Install Plugin from Disk...

Supported languages

SonarLint for IntelliJ provides out of the box support for the following languages:

• Java
• JavaScript/TypeScript
• Kotlin
• PHP
• Python
• Ruby
• HTML
• XML

More languages can be supported by binding your project to SonarQube or SonarCloud

First taste of SonarLint

Let's analyze a first source file and see what SonarLint can bring.

Copy paste this Java code snippet in a project. It contains a code smell because of duplicated methods:

package org.mycompany;

class MyClass {
  private static final String CODE = "XXX";

  public String calculateCode() {
    doTheThing();
    return CODE;
  }

  public String getName() {
    doTheThing();
    return CODE;
  }

  private void doTheThing() {
    // do it
  }
}

If you open this Java file within the editor, you should see SonarLint reporting the issue by highlighting the text range.

You can hover on the highlight to get a short description of the issue.

If you want to read a more detailed explanation of the issue, we provide context actions. One of them will open the detailed rule description.