Specifying source files¶
When coverage.py is running your program and measuring its execution, it needs to know what code to measure and what code not to. Measurement imposes a speed penalty, and the collected data must be stored in memory and then on disk. More importantly, when reviewing your coverage reports, you don’t want to be distracted with modules that aren’t your concern.
Coverage.py has a number of ways you can focus it in on the code you care about.
Execution¶
When running your code, the coverage run
command will by default measure
all code, unless it is part of the Python standard library.
You can specify source to measure with the --source
command-line switch, or
the [run] source
configuration value. The value is a comma- or
newline-separated list of directories or package names. If specified, only
source inside these directories or packages will be measured. Specifying the
source option also enables coverage.py to report on unexecuted files, since it
can search the source tree for files that haven’t been measured at all. Only
importable files (ones at the root of the tree, or in directories with a
__init__.py
file) will be considered. Files with unusual punctuation in
their names will be skipped (they are assumed to be scratch files written by
text editors). Files that do not end with .py
or .pyo
or .pyc
will also be skipped.
You can further fine-tune coverage.py’s attention with the --include
and
--omit
switches (or [run] include
and [run] omit
configuration
values). --include
is a list of file name patterns. If specified, only
files matching those patterns will be measured. --omit
is also a list of
file name patterns, specifying files not to measure. If both include
and
omit
are specified, first the set of files is reduced to only those that
match the include patterns, then any files that match the omit pattern are
removed from the set.
The include
and omit
file name patterns follow typical shell syntax:
*
matches any number of characters and ?
matches a single character.
Patterns that start with a wildcard character are used as-is, other patterns
are interpreted relative to the current directory:
[run]
omit =
# omit anything in a .local directory anywhere
*/.local/*
# omit everything in /usr
/usr/*
# omit this single file
utils/tirefire.py
The source
, include
, and omit
values all work together to determine
the source that will be measured.
If both source
and include
are set, the include
value is ignored
and a warning is printed on the standard output.
Reporting¶
Once your program is measured, you can specify the source files you want reported. Usually you want to see all the code that was measured, but if you are measuring a large project, you may want to get reports for just certain parts.
The report commands (report
, html
, json
, annotate
, and xml
)
all take optional modules
arguments, and --include
and --omit
switches. The modules
arguments specify particular modules to report on.
The include
and omit
values are lists of file name patterns, just as
with the run
command.
Remember that the reporting commands can only report on the data that has been collected, so the data you’re looking for may not be in the data available for reporting.
Note that these are ways of specifying files to measure. You can also exclude individual source lines. See Excluding code from coverage.py for details.