Question: Sonarqube official docker image, is not persisting any configuration changes like: `creating users, changing root password or even installing new plugins`. 

Once the container is restarted, all the configuration changes disappear and the installed plugins are lost. Even the projects' keys and their previous QA analytics data is unavailable after a restart. 

How can we persist the data when using Sonarqube's official docker image?

Answer: 
* Sonarqube image comes with a temporary h2 database engine which is not recommended for production and doesn't persist across container restarts.
* We need to setup a database of our own and point it to Sonarqube at the time of starting the container.
* Sonarqube docker images exposes two volumes `"$SONARQUBE_HOME/data", "$SONARQUBE_HOME/extensions"` as seen from [Sonarqube Dockerfile](https://github.com/SonarSource/docker-sonarqube/blob/442f950dae232fca8e1e919e017270971cee46f6/4.5.6/Dockerfile#L37%20Sonarqube%20Dockerfile).

Since we wanted to persist the data across invocations, we need to make sure that a production grade database is setup and is linked to Sonarqube and the extensions directory is created and mounted as volume on the host machine so that all the downloaded plugins are available across container invocations and can be used by multiple containers (if required).

Database Setup:

```
create database sonar;
grant all on sonar.* to `sonar`@`%` identified by "SOME_PASSWORD";
flush privileges;

# since we do not know the containers IP before hand, we use '%' for sonarqube host IP.

```

***It is not necessary to create tables***, Sonarqube creates them if it doesn't find them.

Starting up Sonarqube container:

```
# create a directory on host
mkdir /server_data/sonarqube/extensions
mkdir /server_data/sonarqube/data # this will be useful in saving startup time

# Start the container
docker run -d \
    --name sonarqube \
    -p 9000:9000 \
    -e SONARQUBE_JDBC_USERNAME=sonar \
    -e SONARQUBE_JDBC_PASSWORD=SOME_PASSWORD \
    -e SONARQUBE_JDBC_URL="jdbc:mysql://HOST_IP_OF_DB_SERVER:PORT/sonar?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=utf8&rewriteBatchedStatements=true&useConfigs=maxPerformance" \
    -v /server_data/sonarqube/data:/opt/sonarqube/data \
    -v /server_data/sonarqube/extensions:/opt/sonarqube/extensions \
    sonarqube

```
Hi @VanagaS and others landing here.

I just wanted to provide an alternative to the above. Maybe some would even consider it an easier one.

Notice this line [SONARQUBE\_HOME](https://github.com/SonarSource/docker-sonarqube/blob/442f950dae232fca8e1e919e017270971cee46f6/4.5.6/Dockerfile#L5) in the Dockerfile for the `docker-sonarqube` image. We can control this environment variable.

When using `docker run`. Simply do:

`txt
docker run -d \
...
...
-e SONARQUBE_HOME=/sonarqube-data
-v /PERSISTENT_DISK/sonarqubeVolume:/sonarqube-data`

This will make Sonarqube create the conf, data and so forth folders and store data therein. As needed.

---

Or with `Kubernetes`. In your deployment YAML file. Do:

`txt
...
...
env:
- name: SONARQUBE_HOME
 value: /sonarqube-data
...
...
volumeMounts:
- name: app-volume
 mountPath: /sonarqube-data`

And the `name` in the `volumeMounts` property points to a volume in the `volumes` section of the Kubernetes deployment YAML file.
This again will make Sonarqube use the `/sonarqube-data` mountPath for creating extenions, conf and so forth folders, then save data therein.

And voila your Sonarqube data is thereby persisted. 

I hope this will help others.

N.B. Notice that the YAML and Docker run examples are not exhaustive. They focus on the issue of persisting Sonarqube data.