In this paper, we propose a general scale invariant approach for sparse signal recovery via the minimization of the $q$-ratio sparsity. When $1 < q \leq \infty$, both the theoretical analysis based on $q$-ratio constrained minimal singular values (CMSV) and the practical algorithms via nonlinear fractional programming are presented. Numerical experiments are conducted to demonstrate the advantageous performance of the proposed approaches over the state-of-the-art sparse recovery methods.