Bisect_ppx  

Bisect_ppx is a code coverage tool for OCaml. It helps you test thoroughly by showing which parts of your code are not tested.

For a live demonstration, see the coverage report Bisect_ppx generates for itself.

Instructions

Most of these commands go in a Makefile or other script, so that you only have to run that script, then refresh your browser.

1. Install Bisect_ppx.

    opam install bisect_ppx
   

2. Add bisect_ppx to your library- or executable-under-test. Instructions are also available for Ocamlbuild, ocamlfind, and OASIS.

    (library
     (public_name my_code)
     (preprocess (pps bisect_ppx -conditional -no-comment-parsing)))
   

   Don't add bisect_ppx to your tests.

3. Run your test binary. In addition to testing your code, it will produce one or more files with names like bisect0001.out.

    BISECT_ENABLE=yes dune runtest
   

4. Generate the coverage report.

    bisect-ppx-report -I _build/default/ -html coverage/ `find . -name 'bisect*.out'`
   

5. Open coverage/index.html!

   In each file of the report,

   • Green lines contain expressions, all of which were visited.
   • Red lines contain expressions, none of which were visited.
   • Yellow lines contain expressions, some of which were visited, but others not.
   • White lines are those that don't contain visitable expressions. They may have type declarations, keywords, or something else that Bisect_ppx did not, or cannot instrument.

See also the advanced usage.

Coveralls.io

You can generate a Coveralls json report using the bisect-ppx-report tool with the -coveralls flag. Note that Bisect_ppx reports are more precise than Coveralls, which only considers whole lines as visited or not. The built-in Coveralls reporter will consider a full line unvisited if any point on that line is not visited, check the html report to verify precisly which points are not covered.

Example using the built-in Coveralls reporter on Travis CI (which sets $TRAVIS_JOB_ID):

  bisect-ppx-report \
      -I _build/default/ \
      -coveralls coverage.json \
      -service-name travis-ci \
      -service-job-id $TRAVIS_JOB_ID \
      `find . -name 'bisect*.out'`
  curl -L -F json_file=@./coverage.json https://coveralls.io/api/v1/jobs

Bisect_ppx in practice

A small sample of projects using Bisect_ppx:

• Lwt
• Oml (report)
• ctypes (report)
• ocaml-irc-client (report)
• Markup.ml (report)
• Ketrew
• Sosa

License

Bisect_ppx is available under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL). To summarize, you can incorporate Bisect_ppx into proprietary projects. If you make modifications to Bisect_ppx, you have to open-source them. The rest of your project remains proprietary.

Essentially, this is like the BSD or MIT licenses, except that if you include a customized Bisect_ppx in a release (as opposed to private use), you have to make the altered source visible. This can be done by contributing the changes back, keeping Bisect_ppx in a visible fork, or if your bigger project itself also happens to be open source.

Besides proprietary licenses, MPL is compatible with BSD/MIT/Apache- and (L)GPL-licensed projects. See the MPL 2.0 FAQ.

The Ocamlbuild plugin is dedicated to the public domain.

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are warmly welcome. Bisect_ppx is developed on GitHub, so please open an issue.

To get the latest development version of Bisect_ppx using OPAM, run

opam source --dev-repo --pin bisect_ppx

You will now have a bisect_ppx subdirectory to work in.