Coverage visualization

Use the artifacts:reports:coverage_report keyword to display line-by-line coverage annotations in merge request diffs.

This keyword displays diff annotations only. It does not display a coverage percentage in the MR widget or populate coverage history graphs. To display a coverage percentage, configure the coverage keyword separately.

After the pipeline completes, GitLab processes the report in the background and annotates lines in the MR diff:

• Green: the line is covered by tests.
• Red: the line is not covered by tests.
• Orange (Cobertura only): the line is loaded but never executed.

Annotations appear only on files changed in the MR diff. Files not changed in the MR are not annotated, even if the report includes coverage data for them.

Configure coverage visualization

To configure coverage visualization, add artifacts:reports:coverage_report to your job:

test:
  script:
    - run tests with coverage
  artifacts:
    reports:
      coverage_report:
        coverage_format: cobertura  # or jacoco
        path: coverage/coverage.xml

For language-specific examples, see:

• Cobertura
• JaCoCo

To collect multiple reports, use a wildcard in the artifact path. GitLab merges the results into a single report.

Coverage reports from child pipelines appear in MR diff annotations.

Limits

If your Cobertura report exceeds 100 <source> nodes, annotations may be missing or mismatched in the diff view. For large projects, split the report into smaller files. See issue 328772 for details.

The visualization appears only after the pipeline completes. If the pipeline has a blocking manual job, the visualization is not available until that job runs.

To download the coverage report from the job details page, add it to the artifact paths as well as reports:

artifacts:
  paths:
    - coverage/cobertura-coverage.xml
  reports:
    coverage_report:
      coverage_format: cobertura
      path: coverage/cobertura-coverage.xml

Path resolution

Coverage reports use relative file paths. GitLab resolves these to absolute repository paths by matching them against the files changed in the MR.

For JaCoCo, the matching process is:

1. Find all merge requests for the same pipeline ref.
2. For all changed files, collect the absolute paths.
3. For each relative path in the report, use the first matching absolute path.

For Cobertura, GitLab also uses the <sources> element to reconstruct paths:

1. Extract path segments from each <source> entry.
2. Combine each segment with the filename attribute of each <class> element.
3. Check if the candidate path exists in the repository.
4. Use the first match as the absolute path.

This automatic correction only works when <source> paths follow the format <CI_BUILDS_DIR>/<PROJECT_FULL_PATH>/....

Path resolution example

For a C# project with a full path of test-org/test-cs-project and these files relative to the project root:

Auth/User.cs
Lib/Utils/User.cs

With these sources in the Cobertura XML:

<sources>
  <source>/builds/test-org/test-cs-project/Auth</source>
  <source>/builds/test-org/test-cs-project/Lib/Utils</source>
</sources>

The parser extracts Auth and Lib/Utils from the sources, then combines each with the filename attribute of each <class> element. For a class with filename="User.cs", the first candidate that matches a file in the repository is Auth/User.cs.

For each <class> element, the parser attempts up to 100 iterations. If no match is found, the class is not included in the final coverage report.

Troubleshooting

When working with coverage visualization, you might encounter the following issues.

Diff annotations do not appear

Annotations might not appear for the following reasons:

• The pipeline has not completed. Annotations are generated after the pipeline finishes. Wait for the pipeline to complete, then reload the MR diff.

• The file is not in the MR diff. Annotations appear only on files changed in the MR, even if the report includes coverage data for other files.

• The file path in the report does not match the repository path. If path resolution fails, the annotation is silently skipped. To diagnose, download the coverage XML artifact and compare the filename attribute on a <class> element to the file’s path in the repository relative to the project root.

• The project has multiple modules with duplicate relative paths. When paths are not unique across modules, GitLab cannot resolve which file the annotation belongs to. Ensure relative paths are unique across modules:

      src/main/java/org/acme/DemoExample.java
    - src/main/other-module/org/acme/DemoExample.java
    + src/main/other-module/org/acme/OtherDemoExample.java
  

• The coverage keyword is not configured. artifacts:reports:coverage_report does not produce a percentage in the MR widget. To display a coverage percentage, configure the coverage keyword separately.

Metrics do not display for all changed files

This issue occurs when you create a new merge request from the same source branch but with a different target branch. The pipeline uses diffs from the previous merge request and does not display annotations for files not in that diff.

To fix this issue, wait until the new merge request is created, then rerun the pipeline.