Measuring sub-processes

Complex test suites may spawn sub-processes to run tests, either to run them in parallel, or because sub-process behavior is an important part of the system under test. Measuring coverage in those sub-processes can be tricky because you have to modify the code spawning the process to invoke coverage.py.

There’s an easier way to do it: coverage.py includes a function, coverage.process_startup() designed to be invoked when Python starts. It examines the COVERAGE_PROCESS_START environment variable, and if it is set, begins coverage measurement. The environment variable’s value will be used as the name of the configuration file to use.

Note

The subprocess only sees options in the configuration file. Options set on the command line will not be used in the subprocesses.

Note

If you have subprocesses created with multiprocessing, the --concurrency=multiprocessing command-line option should take care of everything for you. See Execution: coverage run for details.

When using this technique, be sure to set the parallel option to true so that multiple coverage.py runs will each write their data to a distinct file.

Configuring Python for sub-process measurement

Measuring coverage in sub-processes is a little tricky. When you spawn a sub-process, you are invoking Python to run your program. Usually, to get coverage measurement, you have to use coverage.py to run your program. Your sub-process won’t be using coverage.py, so we have to convince Python to use coverage.py even when not explicitly invoked.

To do that, we’ll configure Python to run a little coverage.py code when it starts. That code will look for an environment variable that tells it to start coverage measurement at the start of the process.

To arrange all this, you have to do two things: set a value for the COVERAGE_PROCESS_START environment variable, and then configure Python to invoke coverage.process_startup() when Python processes start.

How you set COVERAGE_PROCESS_START depends on the details of how you create sub-processes. As long as the environment variable is visible in your sub-process, it will work.

You can configure your Python installation to invoke the process_startup function in two ways:

Create or append to sitecustomize.py to add these lines:
```
import coverage
coverage.process_startup()
```
Create a .pth file in your Python installation containing:
```
import coverage; coverage.process_startup()
```

The sitecustomize.py technique is cleaner, but may involve modifying an existing sitecustomize.py, since there can be only one. If there is no sitecustomize.py already, you can create it in any directory on the Python path.

The .pth technique seems like a hack, but works, and is documented behavior. On the plus side, you can create the file with any name you like so you don’t have to coordinate with other .pth files. On the minus side, you have to create the file in a system-defined directory, so you may need privileges to write it.

Note that if you use one of these techniques, you must undo them if you uninstall coverage.py, since you will be trying to import it during Python start-up. Be sure to remove the change when you uninstall coverage.py, or use a more defensive approach to importing it.

Process termination

To successfully write a coverage data file, the Python sub-process under analysis must shut down cleanly and have a chance for coverage.py to run its termination code. It will do that when the process ends naturally, or when a SIGTERM signal is received.

Coverage.py uses atexit to handle usual process ends, and a signal handler to catch SIGTERM signals.

Other ways of ending a process, like SIGKILL or os._exit, will prevent coverage.py from writing its data file, leaving you with incomplete or non-existent coverage data.