SonarSource/sonarqube · critical · IllegalStateException

The default Quality gate is missing

Error message

The default Quality gate is missing

What it means

QualityGateServiceImpl.findDefaultQualityGate() looks up the Quality Gate flagged as default (QUALITY_GATE default) in the database. If qualityGateDao().selectDefault() returns null — no gate is marked default — it throws IllegalStateException 'The default Quality gate is missing'. The Compute Engine relies on a default gate existing to evaluate projects without an explicit gate assignment.

Source

Thrown at server/sonar-ce-task-projectanalysis/src/main/java/org/sonar/ce/task/projectanalysis/qualitygate/QualityGateServiceImpl.java:50

public class QualityGateServiceImpl implements QualityGateService {
  private final DbClient dbClient;
  private final MetricRepository metricRepository;

  public QualityGateServiceImpl(DbClient dbClient, MetricRepository metricRepository) {
    this.dbClient = dbClient;
    this.metricRepository = metricRepository;
  }

  @Override
  public QualityGate findEffectiveQualityGate(Project project) {
    return findQualityGate(project).orElseGet(this::findDefaultQualityGate);
  }

  private QualityGate findDefaultQualityGate() {
    try (DbSession dbSession = dbClient.openSession(false)) {
      QualityGateDto qualityGateDto = dbClient.qualityGateDao().selectDefault(dbSession);
      if (qualityGateDto == null) {
        throw new IllegalStateException("The default Quality gate is missing");
      }
      return toQualityGate(dbSession, qualityGateDto);
    }
  }

  private Optional<QualityGate> findQualityGate(Project project) {
    try (DbSession dbSession = dbClient.openSession(false)) {
      return Optional.ofNullable(dbClient.qualityGateDao().selectByProjectUuid(dbSession, project.getUuid()))
        .map(qg -> toQualityGate(dbSession, qg));
    }
  }

  private QualityGate toQualityGate(DbSession dbSession, QualityGateDto qualityGateDto) {
    Collection<QualityGateConditionDto> dtos = dbClient.gateConditionDao().selectForQualityGate(dbSession, qualityGateDto.getUuid());

    Collection<Condition> conditions = dtos.stream()
      .map(input -> metricRepository.getOptionalByUuid(input.getMetricUuid())
        .map(metric -> new Condition(metric, input.getOperator(), input.getErrorThreshold()))

View on GitHub (pinned to 184c821202)

Solutions

  1. Open Administration > Quality Gates and ensure one gate (e.g. 'Sonar way') is set as the default — hover the gate and choose 'Set as default'
  2. Recreate the default gate via API/web service if the UI lacks it: POST api/qualitygates/set_default with the gate id
  3. Check the quality_gates table: SELECT id,name FROM quality_gates WHERE default_gate=true (or equivalent) and fix with an UPDATE if the default flag was lost

Example fix

// check and fix via web API
curl -u admin:token -X POST 'https://sonar.example.com/api/qualitygates/set_default?id=AYxSonarWayId'
// SQL inspection
SELECT id, name FROM quality_gates WHERE default_gate = true; -- must return 1 row
Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Validate before calling

// verify a default gate exists before running analyses
curl -u admin:token 'https://sonar.example.com/api/qualitygates/list' | jq '.qualitygates[] | select(.isDefault == true)'
// empty output -> no default gate; set one before launching CE tasks

Try / catch

try {
  QualityGate gate = qualityGateService.getDefaultQualityEngine();
} catch (IllegalStateException e) {
  if (e.getMessage().equals("The default Quality gate is missing")) {
    // recover: mark a gate as default via DB or web service, then retry
    adminApi.setDefaultGate("Sonar way");
  } else throw e;
}

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: Computing a project analysis whose project is not bound to a specific Quality Gate, so the code falls back to the default gate, and no row in the quality_gates table has default=true — e.g. after a corrupted import, manual SQL deletion, or a migration failure.

Common situations: Restoring a database backup without the default gate, deleting the 'Sonar way' gate, bulk-gate management scripts that unset default, or broken upgrade paths between SonarQube versions.

Understand the failure class

Background: "Not found" and "does not exist" errors: why "Task not found", "No such folder", and "Can't find" fire when a lookup comes back empty — this error's family across 14 libraries.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of SonarSource/sonarqube@184c821202 (2026-09-09). Data as JSON: /api/errors/32c59b65758494b8. Report an issue: GitHub.