Monorepo Support

SonarCloud supports repositories that use the monorepo strategy.

What is a monorepo?

Traditionally, software projects have been organized so that each project is stored within a single, distinct repository of its own.

As software projects have become more complex and interconnected, some organizations have moved to having all their projects in a single large repository. This is called the monorepo strategy.

In a typical monorepo, each project occupies its own directory within the repository and each is independently buildable and deployable, though the exact setup depends on how the procedures that build each project are defined. In general, there are many ways that multiple projects can be arranged within a single repository.

Fortunately, SonarCloud's support for the monorepo strategy does not depend on the specifics of the monorepo setup. SonarCloud relies on the fact that each build procedure can be configured to perform the analysis for its particular project in the repository and send the result to the corresponding SonarCloud project.

Monorepos on SonarCloud

In a standard setup, each SonarCloud project corresponds to a single repository.

In a monorepo setup, multiple SonarCloud projects, each corresponding to a separate monorepo project, are all bound to the same repository. 

Each SonarCloud project must have a key unique across SonarCloud (see Analysis Parameters). This is the key that you will use when you configure your CI service. It binds the project in the monorepo to its corresponding SonarCloud project. We recommend using a pattern that includes your organization name, the SonarCloud project name, and an internal reference to the project within the monorepo (for example, myorg_myproject_frontend).

Monorepos on DevOps platforms

Currently, monorepo support is available for GitHub, Bitbucket Cloud, Azure DevOps and GitLab repositories.

Importing a monorepo

• Go to the + (plus) menu on the top right of the SonarCloud interface and select Analyze new project.
• This will take you to the Analyze projects page
• Now click Setup a monorepo (it is a small text link on the lower right of the page).

You will now be on the Import monorepo page.

• Select the organization and then select the monorepo repository that you want to import.
• For each project contained in your monorepo, add a corresponding SonarCloud project by clicking Add new project. You have to choose a unique project key for each SonarCloud project. As mentioned above, these are the keys that you will use when configuring your CI service (see below) to bind each monorepo project to its corresponding SonarCloud project.

Convert a standard project to a monorepo

On the analyze projects page you can also add one or more additional project keys to an existing standard project. This will convert that new set of projects to a monorepo configuration.

Configuring your CI service

The analysis of a monorepo configuration is only supported for CI service setups, not automatic analysis setups. To perform the configuration, follow the procedure for your CI service:

• GitHub Actions
• Travis CI
• Bitbucket Pipelines
• Azure Pipelines
• GitLab CI
• CircleCI
• another CI provider

In the build procedure for each monorepo project, make sure to specify the SonarCloud project key that you designated for it. This provides the binding between the project within the monorepo and the corresponding project in SonarCloud. This enables SonarCloud to correctly process the analysis results and to dispatch pull request decorations back to the DevOps platform for each project individually.

Monorepo is set up

Once the monorepo configuration is complete, when you do an analysis, information from SonarCloud that appears in the pull request view is clearly distinguished by project name.