Troubleshooting Code Quality

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When working with Code Quality, you might encounter the following issues.

The code cannot be found and the pipeline runs always with default configuration

You are probably using a private runner with the Docker-in-Docker socket-binding configuration. You should configure Code Quality checks to run on your worker as documented in Improve Code Quality performance with private runners.

Changing the default configuration has no effect

A common issue is that the terms Code Quality (GitLab specific) and Code Climate (Engine used by GitLab) are very similar. You must add a .codeclimate.yml file to change the default configuration, not a .codequality.yml file. If you use the wrong filename, the default .codeclimate.yml is still used.

No Code Quality report is displayed in a merge request

Code Quality reports from the source or target branch may be missing for comparison on the merge request, so no information can be displayed.

Missing report on the source branch can be due to:

  1. Use of the REPORT_STDOUT environment variable, no report file is generated and nothing displays in the merge request.

Missing report on the target branch can be due to:

  • Newly added Code Quality job in your .gitlab-ci.yml.
  • Your pipeline is not set to run the Code Quality job on your target branch.
  • Commits are made to the default branch that do not run the Code Quality job.
  • The artifacts:expire_in CI/CD setting can cause the Code Quality artifacts to expire faster than desired.

Verify the presence of report on the base commit by obtaining the base_sha using the merge request API and use the pipelines API with the sha attribute to check if pipelines ran.

Only a single Code Quality report is displayed, but more are defined

Code Quality automatically combines multiple reports.

In GitLab 15.6 and earlier, Code Quality used only the artifact from the latest created job (with the largest job ID). Code Quality artifacts from earlier jobs were ignored.

RuboCop errors

When using Code Quality jobs on a Ruby project, you can encounter problems running RuboCop. For example, the following error can appear when using either a very recent or very old version of Ruby: 

/usr/local/bundle/gems/rubocop-0.52.1/lib/rubocop/config.rb:510:in `check_target_ruby':
Unknown Ruby version 2.7 found in `.ruby-version`. (RuboCop::ValidationError)
Supported versions: 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5

This is caused by the default version of RuboCop used by the check engine not covering support for the Ruby version in use.

To use a custom version of RuboCop that supports the version of Ruby used by the project, you can override the configuration through a .codeclimate.yml file created in the project repository.

For example, to specify using RuboCop release 0.67: 

version: "2"
plugins:
  rubocop:
    enabled: true
    channel: rubocop-0-67

No Code Quality appears on merge requests when using custom tool

If your merge requests do not show any Code Quality changes when using a custom tool, ensure that all line properties in the JSON are integer.

Error: Could not analyze code quality

You might get the error: 

error: (CC::CLI::Analyze::EngineFailure) engine pmd ran for 900 seconds and was killed
Could not analyze code quality for the repository at /code

If you enabled any of the Code Climate plugins, and the Code Quality CI/CD job fails with this error message, it’s likely the job takes longer than the default timeout of 900 seconds:

To work around this problem, set TIMEOUT_SECONDS to a higher value in your .gitlab-ci.yml file.

For example: 

code_quality:
  variables:
    TIMEOUT_SECONDS: 3600

Using Code Quality with Kubernetes CI executor

Code Quality requires a Docker in Docker setup to work. The Kubernetes executor already has support for this.

To ensure Code Quality jobs can run on a Kubernetes executor:

Error: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

If you set the CODE_QUALITY_IMAGE to an image that is hosted in a Docker registry which uses a TLS certificate that is not trusted, such as a self-signed certificate, you can see errors like the one below: 

$ docker pull --quiet "$CODE_QUALITY_IMAGE"
Error response from daemon: Get https://gitlab.example.com/v2/: x509: certificate signed by unknown authority

To fix this, configure the Docker daemon to trust certificates by putting the certificate inside of the /etc/docker/certs.d directory.

This Docker daemon is exposed to the subsequent Code Quality Docker container in the GitLab Code Quality template and should be to exposed any other containers in which you want to have your certificate configuration apply.

Docker

If you have access to GitLab Runner configuration, add the directory as a volume mount.

Replace gitlab.example.com with the actual domain of the registry.

Example: 

[[runners]]
  ...
  executor = "docker"
  [runners.docker]
    ...
    privileged = true
    volumes = ["/cache", "/etc/gitlab-runner/certs/gitlab.example.com.crt:/etc/docker/certs.d/gitlab.example.com/ca.crt:ro"]

Kubernetes

If you have access to GitLab Runner configuration and the Kubernetes cluster, you can mount a ConfigMap.

Replace gitlab.example.com with the actual domain of the registry.

  1. Create a ConfigMap with the certificate: 

    kubectl create configmap registry-crt --namespace gitlab-runner --from-file /etc/gitlab-runner/certs/gitlab.example.com.crt

  2. Update GitLab Runner config.toml to specify the ConfigMap: 

    [[runners]]
  ...
  executor = "kubernetes"
  [runners.kubernetes]
    image = "alpine:3.12"
    privileged = true
    [[runners.kubernetes.volumes.config_map]]
      name = "registry-crt"
      mount_path = "/etc/docker/certs.d/gitlab.example.com/ca.crt"
      sub_path = "gitlab.example.com.crt"

Failed to load Code Quality report

The Code Quality report can fail to load when there are issues parsing data from the artifact file. To gain insight into the errors, you can execute a GraphQL query using the following steps:

  1. Go to the pipeline details page.
  2. Append .json to the URL.
  3. Copy the iid of the pipeline.
  4. Go to the interactive GraphQL explorer.

  5. Run the following query: 

    {
  project(fullPath: "<fullpath-to-your-project>") {
    pipeline(iid: "<iid>") {
      codeQualityReports {
        count
        nodes {
          line
          description
          path
          fingerprint
          severity
        }
        pageInfo {
          hasNextPage
          hasPreviousPage
          startCursor
          endCursor
        }
      }
    }
  }
}

No report artifact is created

With certain Runner configurations, the Code Quality scanning job may not have access to your source code. If this happens, the gl-code-quality-report.json artifact won’t be created.

To resolve this issue, either: