When the Code Sight plug-in runs, and Coverity is configured to use a Coverity Connect server, Code Sight searches for a user-specific coverity.conf file on your local system.

  • If Code Sight finds a local coverity.conf file, it uses the information that is stored there to locate the local installation of Coverity Analysis.
  • If it does not find a preexisting coverity.conf file, then it does the following:
    1. Downloads Coverity Analysis from the server being used.

      This requires you to specify a URL for the server, and to authenticate yourself.

    2. Coverity then creates a new user-specific coverity.conf file, and saves it to the expected location for a local Coverity configuration file.

      The default location for the user-specific coverity.conf file depends on which platform you are running, as shown in the following table:

      Table 1. Default location of the coverity.conf file
      Platform Location of coverity.conf
      Linux or Mac /Users/<username>/.coverity/
      Windows C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\Coverity\
CAUTION: If Coverity is installed simply by unzipping the installer (a .zip file), this does not create an entry in the coverity.conf file. In this case, the user-specific coverity.conf file must be created by hand.

The default location where Code Sight installs Coverity Analysis also depends on your platform:

Table 2. Default location of the Coverity Analysis installation
Platform Location of Coverity
Linux or Mac /Users/<username>/.blackduck/desktop/
Windows C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Roaming\BlackDuck\desktop\

Code Sight only reads the known_installations property from the user-specific configuration file.

As the name of the known_installations field implies, a system can have more than one installation of Coverity Analysis, and the user-specific coverity.conf file can accommodate this, as shown in the following sample JSON code: 

{
    "format_version": 1,
    "settings": {
        "known_installations": [
            {
                "platform": "macosx",
                "directory": "/Users/<username>/.blackduck/desktop/controller/\
installedtools/coverity-analysis/2024.03",
                "kind": "cov-analysis",
                "version": "2024.03"
            },
            {
                "platform": "macosx",
                "directory": "/Applications/cov-analysis-macosx-2024.06",
                "kind": "cov-analysis",
                "version": "2024.06"
            },
            {
                "platform": "macosx",
                "directory": "/Users/<username>/.blackduck/desktop/controller/\
installedtools/coverity-analysis/2024.06",
                "kind": "cov-analysis",
                "version": "2024.06"
            }
        ]
   },
   "type": "Coverity configuration"
}

When more than one Coverity Analysis installation is present, Code Sight chooses the one that supports the active project and stream, when these apply. Otherwise, it uses the most recent of the installations.