nno / mocov

A coverage report generator for Matlab and GNU Octave.

MOcov

MOcov is a coverage report generator for Matlab and GNU Octave.

Features

• Runs on both the Matlab and GNU Octave platforms.
• Can be used directly with continuous integration services, such as [coveralls-io] and Shippable.
• Integrates with MOxUnit, a unit test framework for Matlab and GNU Octave
• Distributed under the MIT license, a permissive free software license.

Installation

• Using the shell (requires a Unix-like operating system such as GNU/Linux or Apple OSX):

  git clone https://github.com/MOcov/MOcov.git
  cd MOcov
  make install

  This will add the MOxUnit directory to the Matlab and/or GNU Octave searchpath. If both Matlab and GNU Octave are available on your machine, it will install MOxUnit for both.

• Manual installation:

  • Download the zip archive from the MOxUnit website.

  • Start Matlab or GNU Octave.

  • On the Matlab or GNU Octave prompt, cd to the MOxUnit root directory, then run:

    cd MOcov            % cd to MOcov subdirectory
    addpath(pwd)        % add the current directory to the Matlab/GNU Octave path
    savepath            % save the path

Generating coverage reports

There are two methods to generate coverage while evaluating a particular expression:

1. the 'file' method takes a directory with files for which coverage is to be determined, rewrites all files in that directory so that coverage of each line is recorded, stores them in a temporary directory, and adds the temporary directory to the path. This method runs on both GNU Octave and Matlab, but is typically slow.

2. the 'profile' method uses the Matlab profiler. This method runs on Matlab only, but is generally faster.

Use cases

Typical use cases for MOcov are:

• locally run code with coverage for code in a unit test framework on GNU Octave or Matlab. Use

      mocov('-cover','path/with/code',...
              '-expression','run_test_command',...
              '-cover_json_file','coverage.json',...
              '-cover_xml_file','coverage.xml',...
              '-cover_html_dir','coverage_html',
              '-method','file');

  to generate coverage reports for all files in the 'path/with/code' directory when running eval('run_test_command'). Results are stored in JSON, XML and HTML formats. On the Matlab platform, the instead of 'method','file' also 'method','profile' can be used.

• as a specific example of the use case above, when using the MOxUnit unit test platform such tests can be run as

      success=moxunit_runtests('path/with/tests',...
                                  '-with_coverage',...
                                  '-cover','/path/with/code',...
                                  '-cover_xml_file','coverage.xml',...
                                  '-cover_html_dir','coverage_html');
  

  where 'path/with/tests' contains unit tests.

• use with continuous integration service, such as shippable.com or travis-ci combined iwth coveralls.io. See the .travis.yml in the MOxUnit project for an example.

Use with travis-ci and Shippable

MOcov can be used with the Travis-ci and Shippable service for continuous integration testing. This is achieved by setting up a .travis.yml configuration file.

Due to recursiveness issues, MOcov cannot use these services to generate coverage reports for itself. For an example, see the MOxUnit .travis.yml file.

Compatibility notes

• Because GNU Octave 3.8 and 4.0 do not support classdef syntax, 'old-style' object-oriented syntax is used for the class definitions.

Limitations

Currently MOxUnit does not support:

• Documentation tests (these would require evalc, which is not available on GNU Octave as of January 2014).
• Support for setup and teardown functions in TestCase classes.

Contact

Nikolaas N. Oosterhof, nikolaas dot oosterhof at unitn dot it

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2015 Nikolaas N. Oosterhof

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.