Coverage.py vs. Istanbul vs. LuaCov vs. Python Comparison Chart

Coverage.py is a tool for measuring code coverage of Python programs. It monitors your program, noting which parts of the code have been executed, then analyzes the source to identify code that could have been executed but was not. Coverage measurement is typically used to gauge the effectiveness of tests. It can show which parts of your code are being exercised by tests, and which are not. Use coverage run to run your test suite and gather data. However you normally run your test suite, and you can run your test runner under coverage. If your test runner command starts with “python”, just replace the initial “python” with “coverage run”. To limit coverage measurement to code in the current directory, and also find files that weren’t executed at all, add the source argument to your coverage command line. By default, it will measure line (statement) coverage. It can also measure branch coverage. It can tell you what tests ran which lines.

LuaCov is a simple coverage analyzer for Lua scripts. When a Lua script is run with the luacov module loaded, it generates a stats file with the number of executions of each line of the script and its loaded modules. The luacov command-line script then processes this file generating a report file which allows one to visualize which code paths were not traversed, which is useful for verifying the effectiveness of a test suite. LuaCov includes several configuration options, which have their defaults stored in src/luacov/defaults.lua. These are the global defaults. To use project specific configuration, create a Lua script setting options as globals or returning a table with some options and store it as .luacov in the project directory from where luacov is being run. For example, this config informs LuaCov that only foo module and its submodules should be covered and that they are located inside src directory.