cargo-coverage-annotations 0.1.3

Ensure annotations in code match actual coverage.
cargo-coverage-annotations-0.1.3 is not a library.

cargo-coverage-annotations Build Status

Ensure annotations in code match actual coverage.

Installing

To install:

cargo install cargo-coverage-annotations

Running

Creating coverage XML file(s)

To run on a cargo project in the current working directory, first generate cobertura.xml files(s) anywhere under the current working directory. This can be done in one of way too many ways, as there's no standard rust cargo coverage for now.

Two options I have tested and you might want to consider are:

  • cargo tarpaulin --out Xml will generate a single cobertura.xml file in the top level directory. This is much simpler to use than kcov, without requiring cargo make.

    However, as of version 0.5.5, tarpaulin is still buggy. For example, it tends to complain } else { lines are not covered, even though both branches of the if statement are covered. This will require you to insert spurious coverage annotations to the source code, which defeats their purpose.

  • cargo make coverage will by default use kcov to generate several cobertura.xml files nested in the bowels of target/coverage/.... This requires installing cargo make, which I found to be more convenient than trying to create the magical incantations for running kcov myself. TODO: Create a sample Makefile.toml that automates running the coverage and then verifying the annotations, in a single cargo make command.

    Note that cargo make version 0.7.11 insists all your files in the tests directory be named test_*.rs, and that there will be at least one such test file (in addition to any #[test] functions you might have in the sources).

    Note that kcov also returns wrong coverage results, at least sometimes, at least for rust, at least for now. It seems like it isn't as bad as tarpaulin, but you still might need to add (very few) spurious coverage annotations to the source.

Of course, other tools generate other coverage file formats, and place them in different places. If you look at https://codecov.io/bash you will see >1K lines of code for detecting these files, and this doesn't cover the code for parsing the different formats. So, if your favorite tool isn't supported, don't be surprised, and pull requests are welcome ;-)

Verifying the coverage annotations

To verify that the coverage annotations in the code match the actual coverage, run cargo coverage-annotations. This will merge the coverage information from all the cobertura.xml files, and compare the results with the coverage annotation comments (see below).

Checking coverage annotations on a CI server

To keep your code base clean, it can be helpful to fail the CI build when the code contains wrong coverage annotations. To achieve this, include cargo coverage-annotations`` in your CI build steps. For example, a minimal Travis setup using tarpaulin` might look like this:

language: rust
cache: cargo
before_script:
- export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.cargo/bin"
- which cargo-tarpaulin || cargo install cargo-tarpaulin
- which cargo-coverage-annotations || cargo install cargo-coverage-annotations
script:
- cargo build
- cargo test
- cargo tarpaulin --out Xml
- cargo coverage-annotations

Note that using cache: cargo is optional but highly recommended to speed up the installation.

Coverage annotations

Coverage annotations are comments that indicate the coverage status of the code lines. By default, code lines are assumed to be covered by tests. Lines that are not tested are expected to end with an explicit // NOT TESTED comment. It is also possible to mark a line with a // MAYBE TESTED comment in special cases (for example, lines that only execute on some platforms).

Sometimes a whole block of lines needs to be marked. In this case, it is possible to surround such lines with // BEGIN NOT TESTED ... // END NOT TESTED comments (or // BEGIN MAYBE TESTED ... // END MAYBE TESTED). Inside such regions, it is possible to override the annotation for specific lines with // TESTED, // NOT TESTED or // MAYBE TESTED comments.

Finally, some files might not be tested at all. In this case, they must contain in one of their lines a // FILE NOT TESTED or // FILE MAYBE TESTED comment. This includes examples files.

Coverage annotations are only used for files in the src directory. They ensure that when reading the code, one is aware of what is and is not covered by tests. Of course, line coverage is only the most basic form of coverage tracking; that said, tracking it at each step is surprisingly effective in isolating cases when the code does not behave as expected.

License

cargo-coverage-annotations is distributed under the GNU General Public License (Version 3.0). See the LICENSE for details.