Code coverage is a great tool to find gaps in your code coverage and making sure your code is covered with tests. High code coverage does not guarantee great test quality so please make sure the tests are well written. At the end this will likely be more important than to cover every line of code.
PHPUnit and code coverage
Traditionally PHPUnit comes with support for generating code coverage reports in different formats.
Over time PHPUnit changed how it is being configured and run. As different Totara versions also come with different PHPUnit versions this document outlines the approach to set up your environment and generate coverage for multiple versions.
To generate code coverage PHPUnit relies on either XDdebug or pcov. The performance of pcov is superior to XDebug but we will show how you can run it with both.
How to configure and generate code coverage reports
Initialise PHPUnit
The first step is to initialise the PHPUnit environment.
Totara 13 and above
php test/phpunit/phpunit.php init
Totara 12
php admin/tool/phpunit/cli/init.php
Whitelists
In order to generate code coverage you need to provide a whitelist in the phpunit.xml file otherwise you get an error when trying to generate the report.
Error: Incorrect whitelist config, no code coverage will be generated.
Add the following to the phpunit.xml file directly after the </php>
tag.
Totara 14 and higher
<coverage> <include> <directory suffix=".php">/var/www/html/server/totara/core/classes/local</directory> <directory suffix=".php">/var/www/html/server/totara/core/classes/task</directory> <file>/var/www/html/server/totara/core/classes/visibility_adviser.php</file> </include> </coverage>
Totara 13
<filter> <whitelist> <directory suffix=".php">/var/www/html/server/totara/core/classes/local</directory> <directory suffix=".php">/var/www/html/server/totara/core/classes/task</directory> <file>/var/www/html/server/totara/core/classes/visibility_adviser.php</file> </whitelist> </filter>
Totara 12
Same as for Totara 13 except that you have to add the processUncoveredFilesFromWhitelist="false" addUncoveredFilesFromWhitelist="false"
attributes.
<filter> <whitelist processUncoveredFilesFromWhitelist="false" addUncoveredFilesFromWhitelist="false"> <directory suffix=".php">/var/www/html/totara/core/classes/local</directory> <directory suffix=".php">/var/www/html/totara/core/classes/task</directory> <file>/var/www/html/totara/core/classes/visibility_adviser.php</file> </whitelist> </filter>
This is just an example. Please change the whitelist so it matches your needs. Only directories and files included in the whitelist will be showing up in the report.
Please make sure you use full paths to the files and directories. Otherwise PHPUnit might show an error about an incorrect whitelist configuration.
You can also use <exclude>
tags. Please refer to the PHPUnit documentation for the full configuration details.
The more files are included in the whitelist the longer it takes to generate the coverage report. It is advised to limit it to the files / directories you are interested in.
Generating coverage
XDebug
Please make sure you have xdebug installed.
To generate the coverage report use the following command to generate a HTML formatted report.
Totara 13 and above
XDEBUG_MODE=coverage php test/phpunit/phpunit.php run --filter=totara_core --coverage-html /var/www/totara/src/dev/coverage
Totara 12
XDEBUG_MODE=coverage vendor/bin/phpunit --filter=totara_core --coverage-html /var/www/html/coverage_report
Please note that this only runs the test for a particular area of the code to reduce the runtime. This should match what you have configured as a whitelist.
You can also generate a Clover XML report to be used in other tools:
Totara 13 and above
XDEBUG_MODE=coverage php test/phpunit/phpunit.php run --filter=totara_core --coverage-clover /tmp/coverage_report.xml
Totara 12
XDEBUG_MODE=coverage vendor/bin/phpunit --filter=totara_core --coverage-clover /tmp/coverage_report.xml
Please refer to the PHPUnit documentation for the available formats.
pcov
pcov is an alternative to XDebug. It is much more performant.
To get it running:
Install the pcov extension with
pecl install pcov
Only for Totara 12: Install pcov/clobber which adds pcov support to PHPUnit 7
composer require pcov/clobber vendor/bin/pcov clobber
Enable and configure the extension in the php.ini
[pcov] extension=pcov.so pcov.enabled=1 pcov.exclude='~(vendor|tests|node_modules|.git|client|.scannerwork)~' pcov.initial.memory=1073741824 pcov.initial.files=30000
Ensure PHP has enough memory in php.ini. Give it heaps, as code coverage is memory intensive.
memory_limit=8G
Generate the code coverage
Totara 13 and above
cd /path/to/code XDEBUG_MODE=off php -dpconv.directory=`pwd` test/phpunit/phpunit.php run --filter=totara_core --coverage-html /var/www/html/coverage_report
Totara 12
cd /path/to/code XDEBUG_MODE=off php -d pcov.directory=`pwd` vendor/bin/phpunit --filter=totara_core --coverage-html /var/www/html/coverage_report
This will create a nicely formatted report for you to inspect.
[pcov] extension=pcov.so pcov.enabled=1 pcov.exclude='~(vendor|tests|node_modules|.git|client|.scannerwork)~' pcov.initial.memory=1073741824 pcov.initial.files=30000
Generate the code coverage
cd /path/to/code XDEBUG_MODE=off php -d pcov.directory=`pwd` vendor/bin/phpunit --filter=totara_core --coverage-html /var/www/html/coverage_report