Azure DevOps Pills: Update java in agent machines if you use SonarCloud integration

If you have Azure DevOps pipelines that uses SonarCloud analyzer, you should update java version for your agents if you are using version 8 because support is going to drop.

Figure 1: Warning message for old java version installed

You have not many days left to solve this issue before your builds starts failing because Sonar Cloud analyzer will no longer work. The solution is simple, you can simply download an updated version of Open JDK in all agent machines. To check actual java version used you can simply check the JAVA_HOME capability directly in agent administration page.

If you like me just unzip new SDK into a new directory and update JAVA_HOME accordingly, you can find that the agent still have java capability pointing to the old jdk.

Figure 2: Agent java capabilities

If you still have the warning it usually happens because you did not update JAVA_HOME variable accordingly pointing to new version of Java JDK or because the agent task still uses the old version. For Sonar Cloud setting JAVA_HOME is enough. To check if everything is ok you can look at pipeline run log to verify exact version used.

Figure 3: Check java version used by Sonar Cloud analyzer task

As you can see in Figure 3 actually the agent is using correct version.

If you do not want to update JAVA_HOME for the entire machine, you can set JAVA_HOME only for Azure DevOps agent if the agent is not run as a service. In this scenario you can simply edit run.cmd file to set JAVA_HOME to correct version.

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@echo off

...

SET JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk-14.0.2

if /i "%~1" equ "localRun" (
    rem ********************************************************************************

...

When you manually starts your agent, JAVA_HOME points to JDK 14.

Gian Maria.