SonarQube Cloud Documentation

What is SonarQube Cloud?

SonarQube Cloud (formerly known as SonarCloud) is an industry standard Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) automated code review and static analysis tool designed to detect coding issues in 30+ languages, frameworks, and IaC platforms. By integrating directly with your CI pipeline or one of the supported DevOps platforms, your code is checked against an extensive set of rules that cover many attributes of code, such as maintainability, reliability, and security issues, on each merge/pull request.

SonarQube Cloud extends your DevOps experience by performing automated code checks within minutes. Here’s how to get started using SonarQube Cloud:

Please have a look at the Discovering SonarQube Cloud section to learn more about What SonarQube Cloud can do. For on-premise code repositories, see SonarQube Server.

The approach to Clean Code

Clean Code is the standard for all code that results in secure, reliable, and maintainable software therefore, writing clean code is essential to maintaining a healthy codebase. This applies to all code: source code, test code, infrastructure as code, glue code, scripts, and more.

Sonar's Clean as You Code approach is a software development practice based on the principle that new code (code that you added or modified recently) needs to follow quality standards. The SonarQube offering implements Clean as You Code as part of the automated code review by warning you whenever issues are detected in your new code, helping you maintain high standards and focus on code quality by incrementally improving the entire code base.

SonarQube Cloud comes with a built-in quality profile designed for each supported language, called the Sonar Way profile. The Sonar way activates a set of rules that should be applicable to most projects and is a starting point to help you implement clean code practices in your organization.

The Sonar Solution

Sonar products are designed to help you achieve a state of Clean Code. By linking SonarQube for IDE with SonarQube Cloud or SonarQube Server, the automated code analysis and reviews are performed at every stage of the development process. We call this the Sonar solution. This means your project settings, new code definitions, and quality profiles are applied locally to an analysis in the IDE. The Sonar solution is designed to help you achieve a state of Clean Code. Your project settings, new code definitions, and the quality profiles managed in SonarQube Cloud are applied locally to an analysis in the IDE.

• SonarQube for IDE brings automated code reviews directly into your development environment, helping you catch issues as you write code. By providing immediate feedback, it enables engineers to identify and fix problems before they even commit, ensuring cleaner, higher-quality code from the start.
• Then, SonarQube Server and SonarQube Cloud deliver powerful static code analysis by thoroughly reviewing each pull request before it’s merged. This proactive approach adds an essential layer of protection, ensuring code quality and preventing issues from entering your codebase.
• Finally, SonarQube Server and SonarQube Cloud seamlessly integrate into your CI/CD pipeline, analyzing code on every build. By leveraging quality profiles and quality gates, they automatically block code with issues from being released to production, ensuring only maintainable, reliable, and secure code makes it through.

The Sonar solution helps you incorporate the Clean as You Code methodology by helping engineers pay attention to new code. Focusing on writing new, clean code during development ensures that all code released for production will be incrementally improved over time.

Connected Mode

Connected mode joins SonarQube Cloud with SonarQube for IDE to deliver the full Sonar solution. While in connected mode, SonarQube Cloud sends notifications to SonarQube for IDE when a quality gate changes or a new issue is assigned to the user. Smart notifications can be enabled or disabled from the SonarQube for IDE UI while creating or editing the connection settings. In addition, SonarQube for IDE helps the engineer focus on writing clean code by using the new code definition defined on the server.

Be sure to check out all of the Connected mode benefits.

Getting started

Now that you've heard about how SonarQube Cloud can help you write clean code, you are ready to try out SonarQube Cloud for yourself. After signing up for SonarQube Cloud using the login from your DevOps platform account, you can import your organizations and repositories to set up a First analysis. 

The Overview of integrated CIs section explains how to connect your scanner to your CI pipeline and provides instructions for analyzing your project’s branches and pull requests.

Here is a page with everything you need to Discover SonarQube Cloud.

Learn more

Check out the entire suite of Sonar products: SonarQube Server, SonarQube Cloud, and SonarQube for IDE.

Then, have a look at how to fix issues detected by SonarQube for IntelliJ, Visual Studio, VS Code, and Eclipse when combined with SonarQube Server and SonarQube Cloud, and browse a full list of Sonar Rules and Rule Descriptions available for static code analysis.

More getting started resources

• Getting started with SonarQube Cloud
• Advanced setup and Automatic analysis
• How to administer quality profiles
• How to manage portfolios

And if you need help, visit our online community to search for answers and reach out with questions!