Plugins¶

Coverage.py’s behavior can be extended with third-party plugins. A plugin is a separately installed Python class that you register in your .coveragerc. Plugins can be used to implement coverage measurement for non-Python files.

Plugins are only supported with the C extension, which must be installed for plugins to work.

Information about using plugins is on this page. To write a plugin, see Plugin classes.

New in version 4.0.

Using plugins¶

To use a coverage.py plugin, you install it, and configure it. For this example, let’s say there’s a Python package called something that provides a coverage.py plugin called something.plugin.

Install the plugin’s package as you would any other Python package:
```
pip install something
```
Configure coverage.py to use the plugin. You do this by editing (or creating) your .coveragerc file, as described in Configuration files. The plugins setting indicates your plugin. It’s a list of importable module names of plugins:
```
[run]
plugins =
    something.plugin
```
If the plugin needs its own configuration, you can add those settings in the .coveragerc file in a section named for the plugin:
```
[something.plugin]
option1 = True
option2 = abc.foo
```
Check the documentation for the plugin to see if it takes any options, and what they are.
Run your tests with coverage.py as you usually would. If you get a message like “Plugin file tracers (something.plugin) aren’t supported with PyTracer,” then you don’t have the C extension installed.

Available plugins¶

Some coverage.py plugins you might find useful:

Django template coverage.py plugin: for measuring coverage in Django templates.
Mako template coverage plugin: for measuring coverage in Mako templates. Doesn’t work yet, probably needs some changes in Mako itself.