Go, the programming language written and maintained by Google, shines with it's toolchain. However, some of the tools behave differently than expected and it may cost you several hours of debugging and experimenting to find the arguments and execution orders.

This article introduces you to the problem of reporting accurate code coverage using the Go programming language, and offers a solution that runs on any Operating System. If you have not worked with Code Coverage in Golang, consider reading the excellent Go cover story first.

If you are looking for the solution only, run this:

# Download and install go-acc
$ go get -u github.com/ory/go-acc

# Run it against some package(s)
$ go-acc github.com/some/package
$ go-acc .
$ go-acc ./...
$ go-acc $(glide novendor)

Missing Cross-Package Coverage

While writing integration tests for one of our open source Go projects, I noticed that code coverage did not increase despite writing a lot of them.

The reason for this was that go test -cover is per default only recording code coverage for the package that is currently tested, not for all the packages from the project. If you have a lot of integration tests, your code coverage might be higher than you think!

Code Example

First I want to take a look at some code. This repository is available on GitHub . The repository consist of two packages pkg and otherpkg. The first package defines two functions, SayCode and SayCoverage and a test for SayCode. The second package defines a function SayCodeCoverage that uses SayCode and SayCoverage, and a test for SayCodeCoverage:

// funcs.go
package pkg

func SayCode() string {
    return "code"
}

func SayCoverage() string {
    return "coverage"
}

// funcs_test.go
package pkg

import "testing"

func TestSayCode(t *testing.T) {
    if SayCode() != "code" {
        t.Fail()
    }
}

// cc.go
package otherpkg

import "github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/pkg"

func SayCodeCoverage() string {
    return pkg.SayCode() + " " + pkg.SayCoverage()
}

// cc_test.go
package otherpkg

import "testing"

func TestSayCodeCoverage(t *testing.T) {
    if SayCodeCoverage() != "code coverage" {
        t.Fail()
    }
}

The Golang go test -coverpkg Flag

Let's use -covermod=atomic to get a report of how well the tests cover the code. We expect 100% code coverage because every line is being touched by the tests:

$ go get -d -u github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage
$ go test -covermode=atomic \
    github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/...

ok  github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/otherpkg  10.115s coverage: 100.0% of statements
ok  github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/pkg        0.485s coverage:  50.0% of statements

That didn't go as expected! Code coverage reports only 75% (100% + 50%) code coverage. That happens because go test -covermode is not collecting coverage reports on code that doesn't belong to the package currently being tested. Of course, Go has a flag for that, it's called -coverpkg. This flag accepts a list of packages to consider while computing code coverage:

$ go test -covermode=atomic \
    -coverpkg $(go list github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/...) \
    github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/...


ok  github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/pkg       22.494s coverage:   0.0% of statements in github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/otherpkg
ok  github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/otherpkg  10.398s coverage: 100.0% of statements in github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/otherpkg

Awesome, we received true code coverage!

The following section is outdated and -coverpkg and -coverprofile are now compatible with each other! Thanks Maria!

Golang flag -coverprofile is incompatible with -coverpgk

How about getting some nice code coverage reporting using, for example, coveralls.io ? Since go test supports writing the coverage report to a file using -coverprofile, this should be an easy one:

$ go test -covermode=atomic \
    -coverprofile=coverage.tmp \
    -coverpkg $(go list github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/...) \
    github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/...

cannot use test profile flag with multiple packages

Using the flag -coverprofile, go test is unable to merge code coverage from multiple packages into one report. Thus, what needs to be done is loop through all the packages, and merge the outputs into one. Doing this either requires some bash magic (which does not work on windows), or go-acc:

# Download and install go-acc
$ go get -u github.com/ory/go-acc

# Run it against some package(s)
$ go-acc github.com/some/package
$ go-acc .
$ go-acc ./...

# You can use your regular toolchain as well:
$ go-acc $(go list ./...)
$ go-acc $(glide novendor)

Now, let's run this against the package from above:

$ go get -d -u github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/...
$ go-acc github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/...


ok      github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/otherpkg  0.082s  coverage: 100.0% of statements in github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/otherpkg, github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/pkg
ok      github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/pkg       0.081s  coverage:  33.3% of statements in github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/otherpkg, github.com/arekkas/accurate-test-coverage/pkg

Running go tool cover -html=coverage.txt should open a browser and show that all code has been touched by the tests:

That's it - thank you for reading!