How to Setup SonarQube - Complete Docker, Scanner, and CI/CD Guide

SonarQube is the most widely adopted static analysis platform in the industry, used by over 7 million developers to catch bugs, vulnerabilities, and code smells before they reach production. Whether you are a solo developer running the free Community Edition or an enterprise team deploying across hundreds of repositories, this guide walks you through every step of setting up SonarQube - from a local Docker Compose install all the way to a production CI/CD pipeline with GitHub Actions and PR decoration. By the end of this guide, you will have a fully functional SonarQube instance analyzing your code on every commit and blocking merges when quality standards are not met. Prerequisites Before you begin, make sure you have the following installed on your machine: Docker and Docker Compose - version 20.10 or later for Docker, version 2.0 or later for Compose Git - for cloning your project repository At least 4 GB of RAM allocated to Docker - SonarQube's embedded Elasticsearch is memory-inte