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. You can also use it for tracing: run one test, and see what is visited.

For a live demonstration, see the coverage report Bisect_ppx generates for itself. You may also want to see projects that use Bisect_ppx.

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
   

   You can also install without OPAM.

2. When compiling for testing, include Bisect_ppx. Instructions are also available for Ocamlbuild, OASIS and Jbuilder.

    ocamlfind c -package bisect_ppx -c my_code.ml
    ocamlfind c -c my_tests.ml
    ocamlfind c -linkpkg -package bisect_ppx my_code.cmo my_tests.cmo
   

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

    ./a.out             # Produces bisect0001.out
   

4. Generate the coverage report.

    bisect-ppx-report -I _build/ -html coverage/ 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.

You can submit a coverage report to Coveralls.io using ocveralls. Note that Bisect_ppx reports are more precise than Coveralls, which only considers whole lines as visited or not.

See also the advanced usage.

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

Relation to Bisect

Bisect_ppx is an advanced fork of the excellent Bisect by Xavier Clerc. As of the time of this writing, it appears that the original Bisect is no longer maintained.

Considerable work has been done on Bisect_ppx, so that it is now a distinct project. In terms of the interface, Bisect_ppx is still largely compatible with Bisect's ppx mode, but see here for a list of differences.

If you use Camlp4, you will want to use the original Bisect.

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.