11

I have a project that has almost complete unit test coverage. There's only one statement that isn't covered and I can't work out a good way to do so. Say the project is called foo, I have foo/commands.py:

#!/usr/bin/python
[...]
def main(argv):
    [...]

if __name__ == '__main__':
    return main(sys.argv) # This line allegedly not covered by tests

I do have a test for it! foo/tests/test_commands.py:

import unittest
class CommandsTest(unittest.TestCase):
    def test_direct_call(self):
        proc = subprocess.Popen(['python', 'foo/commands.py', 'help'], stdout=PIPE)
        stdout, stderr = proc.communicate()
        self.assertTrue(stdout.startswith('usage:'))
        self.assertEquals(0, proc.returncode)

(That's not my actual test, but it's along those lines.)

I use nose as my test runner:

nosetests --cover-erase --cover-tests --with-coverage --cover-package=foo -vs foo

The problem is that this particular statement isn't considered "covered", because I use plain python instead of coverage.py (or python-coverage as its called on Ubuntu). I could change it to python-coverage, but I don't really want to do that:

  • It may not be available.
  • If it is available, it may be named differently.
  • It's ok if someone wants to run the test suite without the coverage stuff.

Right now, I have a dreadful hack to do it:

interpreter = 'coverage' in sys.modules ['python-coverage', 'run'] or ['python']

Not exactly the most readable code, but imagine the irony of using the more readable approach:

if 'coverage' in sys.modules:
    interpreter = ['python-coverage', 'run']
else:
    interpreter = ['python']

...only to realise that the "else:" branch ends up not getting called when coverage is enabled, so I just have another line of code that's not exercised by unit tests.

My goal is to fail the test suite if there isn't 100% coverage. I "need" the statement in foo/commands.py because it's a very convenient way to test things during development (in actual installs, it'll use distutils console_scripts magic to call into this file).

Ideas? Prior art? Anything?

Note: 100% coverage is by no means a guarantee that everything is great. Less than 100% is a guarantee, though, that there's something you're not testing. I can easily verify the 100% coverage, so I see no reason not to.

2
  • Why is your goal to fail the test suite if there isn't 100% coverage? What benefits will 100% coverage give you over 95% coverage, but more thorough testing around more critical areas?
    – testerab
    May 7, 2011 at 17:58
  • 100% coverage is by no means a guarantee that everything is great. Less than 100% is a guarantee, though, that there's something you're not testing. I can easily verify the 100% coverage, so I see no reason not to.
    – Soren
    Jan 13, 2012 at 15:15

3 Answers 3

7

The simplest option is to just mark the line as ignored by your coverage tests. You know more than coverage.py does, you can just excuse the line from the measurements:

if __name__ == '__main__':     # pragma: no cover
    return main(sys.argv) 

You can also use some tricks with coverage.py to get it to measure code in launched subprocesses. This sounds like the thing you are really looking for.

0
5

Remove the uncovered line from your .py file and use

python -c "import foo; foo.main(args);"

You can wrap that in an alias or a bash function.

1

Solution 1

Add the following code to your test runner:

import coverage
coverage.process_startup()

For a complete picture, see this sample runtests.py file (which is the entry point for running the tests).

#!/usr/bin/env python
import os
import sys
import pytest
import coverage


def main():
    coverage.process_startup()
    sys.path.insert(0, os.path.abspath('src'))
    return pytest.main()


if __name__ == '__main__':
    sys.exit(main())

Solution 2

In the root of your project add a single file named .pth with the following content:

import coverage; coverage.process_startup()

Solution 3

In the root of your project add a single file named sitecustomize.py with the following content:

import coverage
coverage.process_startup()

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