Getting started with GitHub
Everything you need to know to get started analyzing your GitHub projects on SonarQube Cloud.
Step 1: Sign up
Go to SonarQube Cloud product page and select Start now. The Get started page opens. If you want to use the US region, go to sonarqube.us instead.
Select GitHub from the list of DevOps platforms. You will be taken to the GitHub login page.
Sign in using your GitHub credentials. For prerequisites on your DevOps account’s email address, see Signing in via your DevOps platform service.
Your SonarQube Cloud account is created and bound to your GitHub account. For more information, see Authentication in the Trust Center.
Once you have successfully logged in, you will be prompted to connect your GitHub organization with SonarQube Cloud and create your SonarQube Cloud organization.
Step 2: Create your organization
We use an organization-based structure that mirrors the structure on your chosen DevOps platforms: each SonarQube Cloud organization corresponds one-to-one with a GitHub organization or personal account. A subscription plan is associated one-to-one with a SonarQube Cloud organization. See Subscription plans for a comparison between the different plans.
To create your SonarQube Cloud organization, you’ll import your GitHub organization or personal account to SonarQube Cloud.
Proceed as follows. For detailed prerequisites and instructions, see Importing GitHub organization.
You will be presented with a step-by-step tutorial to install the SonarQube Cloud application on GitHub. This allows SonarQube Cloud to access your GitHub organization or personal account. Once this is done, you’ll be redirected to the subscription page.
Select a plan for your organization. For a plan comparison, select Available plans in the top right corner.
Check the organization details. You can see the organization name and key at the bottom of the page.
If you selected the Team plan, follow the instructions.
Select Create organiziation.
The organization creator becomes the organization admin. To set up the organization permissions, see Managing organization permissions.
Consider upgrading to Enterprise so you can benefit from many features, in particular SSO and SCIM. See About SSO and provisioning.
Step 3: Select your projects
You can now import the existing projects (that is, individual Git repositories) that you want to analyze from your GitHub organization into your newly created SonarQube Cloud organization. A corresponding, one-to-one SonarQube Cloud project will be created for each imported repository.
Proceed as follows (you need the Create Projects permission in your organization):
You have two options for importing repositories:
To import all repositories from your GitHub organization, select the Bulk import all button (Option a in the figure below). For more details, see Bulk importing all repositories.
To select specific repositories to import, choose the ones you want (Option b in the figure). Note that you can only import up to 25 repositories at a time.
Select the Auto-import new GitHub repositories option (Option c in the figure) if you want that new GitHub repositories be automatically imported as soon as they are created in your GitHub organization, skipping the manual new project analysis flow. For more information, see Auto-importing new repositories.
Select the Analyze <n> projects button or the Bulk import all projects button if you have selected the bulk import option. The projects are created.
The project creator becomes the project admin. To set up the project permissions, see Setting your project's permissions.
If a project qualifies for Automatic analysis, SonarQube Cloud will start the analysis of the project’s main branch automatically, and of the most recent active pull requests. See Automatic analysis for more information.
If the Automatic analysis is not supported or not used for your project, you’ll need to configure the analysis. For more information, see Setting up a CI-based analysis.
With the Enterprise plan, you can disable the Automatic analysis for the entire organization. See Disabling automatic analysis.
Step 4: Connect with SonarQube for IDE
SonarQube for IDE is a free IDE extension that integrates with SonarQube Cloud. Like a spell checker, SonarQube for IDE highlights issues as you type.
Install SonarQube for IDE to leverage the power of SonarQube in your IDE. To do so, see SonarQube for IDE.
Step 5: View your analysis results
Once your analysis is completed a project Overview page opens, displaying the Project health dashboard, a built-in Sonar dashboard available in all plans. Custom dashboards and other built-in dashboard views are available in the Enterprise plan.
Review your project’s quality gate
The purpose of Quality gates is to tell you whether your code is good enough to be pushed to the next step:
For the main branch and other long-lived branches, the quality gate answers the question: "Can I release my code today?"
For pull requests (and short-lived branches), the quality gate answers the question: "Can I merge this pull request?"
By keeping an eye on the quality gates, the decision makers can quickly judge the status of code and decide what to do next.
For more information, see Quality gates.
Review your issues
An analysis detects an issue as a problem in your code. When a coding rule is broken, an issue is raised. Each issue affects one or more software qualities with a varying impact level, called severity, as inherited from the rule. For more information about rules, see Viewing and managing rules.
To review your issues, see Managing code issues.
Step 6: Adjust your project setup
The analysis performed by the SonarScanner is configured through analysis parameters. The following applies:
A few analysis parameters are mandatory.
Many analysis parameters, such as those defining the analysis scope, have a default value and can be adjusted.
Analysis parameters allow you to include the code and test coverage in your analysis, or to import issues generated by a third-party analyzer, etc.
SonarQube Server manages the analysis parameters through sonar properties (The sonar property key has the following syntax: sonar.<property>.).
You can configure the analysis parameters in different places. For more information, see Configuration overview.
You can:
Adjust your analysis scope, see Analysis scope.
Implement test coverage, see Test coverage.
Import external analyzer reports, see External analyzer reports.
Define a Long-lived branch pattern, see Long-lived branch pattern.
Change the new code definition applied to your project, see New code definition.
Change the quality gate assigned to your project, see Quality gate.
Change the quality profiles assigned to your project, see Quality profile
Step 7: Check out security reports and portfolios
Managers and tech leads can check out the security reports and portfolios features to begin monitoring the security and releasability of projects. For more information, see Viewing the enterprise reports.
Setting up a CI-based analysis
If the Automatic analysis is not supported for your project or you don't want to use it, you’ll need to set up the analysis. The actual analysis is performed in your build environment (for example, on a cloud CI or your local machine). This means you have to configure your build process to perform the analysis on each build and communicate the results up to SonarQube Cloud. We refer to this analysis method as CI-based analysis in contrast with the automatic analysis.
To understand the SonarQube analysis principles, see SonarQube analysis overview.
To integrate SonarQube Cloud analysis into your GitHub Actions workflow, see Github Actions.
About the SonarQube Cloud analysis
The SonarScanner performs the automated source code analysis as part of your code review process. This stand-alone program runs on the CI/CD host and sends the analysis results to SonarQube Server, which computes them, calculates the quality gate, and generates reports.
To perform the analysis, the SonarScanner uses the Sonar analyzers that it downloads from SonarQube Cloud at installation.
The Sonar Solution offers SonarScanners that integrate with the following build systems: Gradle, Maven, .NET, NPM, and Python. For other project types, the SonarScanner CLI which requires more manual configuration is used.
For more information about integrated CI tools and SonarScanners, see CI-based analysis
Setting up the pull request analysis
By setting up pull request analysis, you ensure pull requests are analyzed when they are opened and every time a change is pushed to the pull request branch. To do so, you must add the SonarQube Cloud analysis to your CI pipeline.
To learn more about pull request analysis, see Pull request analysis.
To integrate SonarQube Cloud analysis into your GitHub Actions workflow, see Github Actions.
Related pages
GitHub (integration solution overview)
Related online learning
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