phpunit/phpcov

CLI frontend for php-code-coverage

12.0.0 2026-02-06 06:59 UTC

Requires

• php: >=8.4
• phpunit/php-code-coverage: ^13.0.1
• phpunit/php-file-iterator: ^7.0.0
• phpunit/phpunit: ^13.0.0
• sebastian/cli-parser: ^5.0.0
• sebastian/diff: ^8.0.0
• sebastian/version: ^7.0.0

BSD-3-Clause

• Sebastian Bergmann

README

phpcov

phpcov is a command-line frontend for the php-code-coverage library.

Installation

This tool is distributed as a PHP Archive (PHAR):

$ wget https://phar.phpunit.de/phpcov-X.Y.phar

$ php phpcov-X.Y.phar --version

Please replace X.Y with the version of PHPCOV you are interested in.

Using Phive is the recommended way for managing the tool dependencies of your project:

$ phive install phpcov

$ ./tools/phpcov --version

It is not recommended to use Composer to download and install this tool.

Usage

Merging serialized code coverage data

When you run PHPUnit with --coverage-php, it writes serialized code coverage data to a .cov file. The phpcov merge command merges multiple .cov files into a single code coverage report.

This is useful when you run test suites in parallel or across separate processes and want to combine the results into one report.

Example

Run your test suites separately, each writing their own .cov file:

$ phpunit --coverage-php /tmp/coverage/FooTest.cov tests/FooTest
$ phpunit --coverage-php /tmp/coverage/BarTest.cov tests/BarTest

Then merge the .cov files and generate a report:

$ phpcov merge --html /tmp/coverage-html /tmp/coverage

All .cov files in the specified directory will be merged.

You can generate reports in multiple formats at once:

$ phpcov merge --html /tmp/coverage-html --openclover /tmp/coverage.xml /tmp/coverage

Exporting merged data

Use --php to write the merged coverage data back to a .cov file:

$ phpcov merge --php /tmp/merged.cov /tmp/coverage

Merging on a different machine

The serialized .cov files store file paths relative to a base path (the common path prefix of all covered files). When generating reports, the source files must be readable so that they can be analysed.

If you are merging .cov files on a different machine than where the tests were run, and the source code is located at a different path, use --source to specify where the source code is on the current machine:

$ phpcov merge --source /home/ci/project --html /tmp/coverage-html /tmp/coverage

Available Report Formats

Option	Format
--clover <file>	Clover XML
--openclover <file>	OpenClover XML
--cobertura <file>	Cobertura XML
--crap4j <file>	Crap4J XML
--html <directory>	HTML
--php <file>	Serialized PHP (.cov)
--text <file>	Plain text
--xml <directory>	PHPUnit XML

Patch Coverage

The phpcov patch-coverage command calculates code coverage for the lines changed in a patch (unified diff). It reports how many of the changed executable lines are covered by tests.

Example

Generate a unified diff and collect code coverage:

$ git diff HEAD^1 > /tmp/patch.txt
$ phpunit --coverage-php /tmp/coverage.cov

Then calculate patch coverage:

$ phpcov patch-coverage /tmp/coverage.cov /tmp/patch.txt
1 / 2 changed executable lines covered (50.00%)

Changed executable lines that are not covered:

  Example.php:11

The command exits with code 0 when all changed executable lines are covered. It exits with 1 when some changed executable lines are not covered. It exits with 2 when no changed executable lines could be detected. This usually indicates a path mismatch.

The --path-prefix option

The --path-prefix option is needed when the file paths in the patch do not match the file paths in the coverage data.

The serialized .cov file stores file paths relative to a base path. The patch file contains paths relative to wherever git diff (or equivalent) was run. When both are relative to the same project root directory, which is the common case, they match and --path-prefix is not needed.

When the paths do not match, --path-prefix specifies the directory to prepend to the paths in the patch so that they can be resolved against the coverage data. For example, if the diff was generated from a parent directory and contains paths like project/src/Foo.php, but the coverage data has paths relative to the project root (src/Foo.php), you would use:

$ phpcov patch-coverage --path-prefix /path/to/project /tmp/coverage.cov /tmp/patch.txt