CodeChecker

CodeChecker is a static analysis infrastructure built on the LLVM/Clang Static Analyzer toolchain, replacing scan-build in a Linux or macOS (OS X) development environment.

Main features

• Support for multiple analyzers, currently Clang Static Analyzer and Clang-Tidy
• Store results of multiple large-scale analysis runs efficiently, either in a PostgreSQL or SQLite database
• Web application for viewing discovered code defects with a streamlined, easy experience
• Filterable (defect checker name, severity, source paths, ...) and comparable (calculates difference between two analyses of the project, showing which bugs have been fixed and which are newly introduced) result viewing
• Subsequent analysis runs only check and update results for modified files without analysing the entire project (depends on build toolchain support!)
• Suppression of known false positive results, either in configuration file or via annotation in source code, along with exclusion of entire source paths from analysis
• quickcheck mode shows analysis results on standard output
• Easily implementable Thrift-based server-client communication used for storing and querying of discovered defects
• Support for multiple bug visualisation frontends, such as the web application, a command-line tool and an Eclipse plugin

User Documentation

• User guide
• CodeChecker getting started (HOWTO)
• Requiring credentials to view analysis results
• Usage of PostgreSQL database

Install

Linux

For a detailed dependency list, please see Requirements. The following commands are used to bootstrap CodeChecker on Ubuntu 16.04.1 LTS:

# Install mandatory dependencies for a development and analysis environment
# NOTE: clang-3.8 can be replaced by any later versions of LLVM/Clang
sudo apt-get install clang-3.8 build-essential curl doxygen gcc-multilib \
  git python-virtualenv python-dev thrift-compiler

# Check out CodeChecker
git clone https://github.com/Ericsson/CodeChecker.git --depth 1 ~/codechecker
cd ~/codechecker

# Create a Python virtualenv and set it as your environment
make venv
source $PWD/venv/bin/activate

# Build and install a CodeChecker package
make package

# For ease of access, add the build directory to PATH
export PATH="$PWD/build/CodeChecker/bin:$PATH"

cd ..

Upgrading environment after system or Python upgrade

If you have upgraded your system's Python to a newer version (e.g. from 2.7.6 to 2.7.12 – this is the case when upgrading Ubuntu from 14.04.2 LTS to 16.04.1 LTS), the installed environment will not work out-of-the-box. To fix this issue, run the following command to upgrade your checker_env too:

cd ~/codechecker/venv
virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 .

Mac OS X

In OSX environment the intercept-build tool from scan-build is used to log the compiler invocations.

It is possible that the intercept-build can not log the compiler calls without turning off System Integrity Protection (SIP). intercept build can automatically detect if SIP is turned off.

You can turn off SIP on El Capitan this way:

• Click the  (Apple) menu.
• Select Restart...
• Hold down command-R to boot into the Recovery System.
• Click the Utilities menu and select Terminal.
• Type csrutil disable and press return.
• Close the Terminal app.
• Click the  (Apple) menu and select Restart....

The following commands are used to bootstrap CodeChecker on OS X El Capitan 10.11.5 and macOS Sierra 10.12 Beta.

Check out and build LLVM/Clang with extra tools. Follow the Get Started with LLVM/Clang documentation.

# Download and install dependencies
brew update
brew install doxygen gcc git
brew install homebrew/versions/thrift090

# Fetch source code
git clone https://github.com/Ericsson/CodeChecker.git --depth 1 ~/codechecker
cd ~/codechecker

# Create a Python virtualenv and set it as your environment
make venv
source $PWD/venv/bin/activate

# Build and install a CodeChecker package
make package

# For ease of access, add the build directory to PATH
export PATH="$PWD/build/CodeChecker/bin:$PATH"

cd ..

Check your first project

Configuring Clang version

Clang and/or Clang-Tidy must be available on your system before you can run analysis on a project. CodeChecker automatically detects and uses the latest available version in your PATH.

If you wish to use a custom clang or clang-tidy binary, e.g. because you intend to use a specific version or a specific build, you need to configure the installed CodeChecker package to use the appropriate binaries. Please edit the configuration file ~/codechecker/build/CodeChecker/config/package_layout.json. In the runtime/analyzers section, you must set the values, as shown below, to the binaries you intend to use.

"analyzers" : {
  "clangsa" : "/path/to/clang/bin/clang-4.0",
  "clang-tidy" : "/path/to/clang/bin/clang-tidy-3.8"
},

Setting up the environment in your Terminal

These steps must always be taken in a new command prompt you wish to execute analysis in.

source ~/codechecker/venv/bin/activate

# Path of CodeChecker package
# NOTE: SKIP this line if you want to always specify CodeChecker's full path
export PATH=~/codechecker/build/CodeChecker/bin:$PATH

# Path of `scan-build.py` (intercept-build)
# NOTE: SKIP this line if you don't want to use intercept-build
export PATH=~/{user path}/llvm/tools/clang/tools/scan-build-py/bin:$PATH

# Path of the built LLVM/Clang
# NOTE: SKIP this line if clang is available in your PATH as an installed Linux package
export PATH=~/{user path}/build/bin:$PATH

Check the test project

Check your project using SQLite database. The database will be placed in your workspace directory (~/.codechecker by default), which can be provided via the -w flag.

Start a CodeChecker web and storage server in another terminal or as a background process. By default it will listen on localhost:8001.

CodeChecker server

Analyze your project with the check command:

CodeChecker check -n test-check -b "cd ~/your-project && make clean && make"

View results

Open the CodeChecker Web Viewer in your browser, and you should be greeted with a web application showing you the analysis results.

Important limitations with older Clang versions

CodeChecker requires some features from LLVM/Clang to work properly which are not available in the 3.6 or earlier releases.

If your installed Clang does not support these features you will see the following debug messages in your log:

Check name wasn't found in the plist file.

• Use clang >= 3.7 or trunk r228624 — otherwise CodeChecker makes a guess based on the report message.

Hash value wasn't found in the plist file.

• Use clang >= 3.8 or trunk r251011 — otherwise CodeChecker generates a simple hash based on the filename and the line content. This method is applied for Clang-Tidy results too, because Clang-Tidy does not support bug identifier hash generation currently.

Developer Documentation

• Requirements, external source dependencies
• Architecture overview
• Package layout
• Checker documentation
• Thrift interface
• Package and integration tests
• Database schema migration
• A high-level overview about the infrastructure is available amongst the 2015Euro LLVM Conference presentations.
  Dániel KRUPP, György ORBÁN, Gábor HORVÁTH and Bence BABATI:
  Industrial Experiences with the Clang Static Analysis Toolset