Getting started with Azure DevOps

If your code is on Azure, go to the SonarCloud product page and choose Set up or Login, then select Azure from the list of DevOps cloud platforms.

Select Azure DevOps to sign in to SonarCloud.

You will be taken to the Microsoft login page. Sign in using your Microsoft credentials.

Welcome to SonarCloud

Once you have successfully logged in, you will see the SonarCloud welcome screen.

Select Import an organization from Azure to bring your projects into SonarCloud .

Welcome to SonarCloud for the first time.

Set up your organization

Connect your Azure DevOps organization with SonarCloud

You will be presented with a screen like this:

You need to enter the name of your Azure DevOps organization and an Azure-generated Personal Access Token created in that organization.

To create the token, go to your Azure DevOps organization User settings > Personal access tokens, then select + New token.

Create a new personal access token in Azure.

On the next page, under Scopes, make sure that you specify at least the scope Code > Read & write.

Set the scope of your new token to Read & write.

Then, click Create to generate the token.

When the personal access token is displayed, copy/paste it into the field on the SonarCloud setup page.

Additionally, in your Azure DevOps organization, you will need to ensure that Azure Active Directory Conditional Access Policy Validation is disabled. An Active Directory administrator should go to Organization Settings > Security > Policies > Enable Azure Active Directory Conditional Access Policy Validation and check that the feature is turned off.

Have your Directory administrator check that this feature is turned off.

Location of Personal Access Tokens in SonarCloud

When you set up your connection to Azure DevOps as described here, your Azure DevOps organization is bound to SonarCloud and the PAT from the Azure organization is registered at the SonarCloud organization level (not at the SonarCloud project level). If you later need to update the value of this token you can find it under Your Organization > Administration > Organization Settings > Azure DevOps connectivity management.

If earlier, you set up an Azure DevOps project manually (not creating a bound organization) you may have registered the PAT at the SonarCloud project level (not the organization level) by filling the field under Your Organization > Your Project > Administration > General Settings > Pull Requests > Integration with Azure DevOps Services.

Entering the Azure PAT at the organization level or at the project level in SonarCloud can lead to different behavior. We recommend that you follow the tutorial to create a bound organization and make sure that the PAT is entered only at the organization level, not at the project level. The project-level field should be left blank.

Use a technical user

We strongly encourage you to add a technical user to your organization, log in to SonarCloud using that technical user, and use the access token of that technical user to connect your Azure DevOps organization to SonarCloud.

Create your SonarCloud organization

SonarCloud is set up to mirror the way that code is organized in Azure DevOps (and other repository providers):

Each SonarCloud project corresponds one-to-one with an Azure DevOps project, which resides in its own Git repository.
Azure DevOps projects are grouped into Azure DevOps organizations.
Each SonarCloud organization corresponds one-to-one with an Azure DevOps organization.

In this step, you will create a SonarCloud organization that corresponds to your Azure DevOps organization.

SonarCloud will suggest a key for your SonarCloud organization. This is a name unique across all organizations within SonarCloud. You can accept the suggestion or change it manually. The interface will prevent you from changing it to an already existing key.

SonarCloud does not support linking an organization to more than one DevOps platform. If you want to link to more than one, you will need to create a separate organization to link to each DevOps service.

Choose a plan

Next, you will be asked to choose a SonarCloud subscription plan. If all the repositories to be analyzed are public on Azure DevOps, you can select the free plan. When using the free plan, your code and analysis results will be publicly accessible at sonarcloud.io/explore/projects.

If you want to analyze one or more private repositories, you must select a paid plan. All paid plans offer a 14-day free trial period. Once the 14 days have elapsed, the cost is based on the number of lines of code analyzed.

A plan is always associated one-to-one with a SonarCloud organization and therefore with a single Azure DevOps organization. If you want to onboard multiple Azure workspaces, you must sign up for a separate plan for each.

Once you have chosen a plan and clicked Create Organization, your SonarCloud organization will be created!

Set up your analysis

Import repositories

The next step is to import the projects (that is, individual git repositories) that you want to analyze (from your Azure DevOps organization) into your newly created SonarCloud organization. A corresponding SonarCloud project will be created for each git repository.

SonarCloud will present a list of the repositories in your Azure DevOps organization. Choose those that you want to import and analyze, then select Set Up to continue.

Choose the repositories that you want to import into SonarCloud.

The selected projects will be imported.

Configure analysis

With Azure DevOps projects the actual analysis is performed in your build environment (cloud CI, local machine, etc.). This means that you must configure your build process to perform the analysis on each build and communicate the results to SonarCloud.

We refer to this analysis method as CI-based analysis (though it may take place in a cloud CI or a manually configured build environment) to contrast it with automatic analysis which works by SonarCloud directly accessing your repository and performing the analysis itself. However, automatic analysis is currently available only for GitHub projects and only for a subset of languages. It is currently not available for Azure DevOps projects.

SonarCloud will guide you through a tutorial on how to set up your build environment to perform analysis.

The first step is to select your build environment. SonarCloud will present this page:

If you have no particular preference and are setting up a new project on Azure DevOps, we recommend using Azure DevOps Pipelines as your CI.

SonarCloud’s in-product tutorial assumes that the user has experience setting up pipelines in Azure DevOps and will walk you through most of the process. You can check our documentation on the SonarCloud Extension for Azure DevOps if more information is needed to set up your YAML file.

For complete instructions to integrate Azure DevOps with SonarCloud, please see the Azure DevOps Labs tutorial, written in part by SonarSource authors.

See your analysis results

A newly imported project will not be computed until changes are made in the code.

Your next steps are to check the results of your first analysis and set your new code definition, an important part of implementing a Clean as You Code strategy.

If you log into SonarCloud using an email address that you previously used to log into another DevOps platform, you need to be aware that SonarCloud will automatically associate your email address with the new DevOps platform. For example, if you log in through Azure DevOps and previously used GitHub, GitHub issues will no longer be assigned to your email address and you will stop receiving GitHub email notifications (via your SonarCloud organization). If you then decide to switch back to GitHub, the Azure DevOps email notifications will be discontinued.