In the dynamic world of Laravel development, ensuring your code is well-tested isn’t just good practice; it’s essential for creating robust applications. Code coverage serves as a critical metric to assess the extent to which your tests cover your codebase.

This guide will walk you through setting up Xdebug for code coverage in Laravel, along with troubleshooting common issues. When you first attempt to run:

php artisan test --coverage

you might encounter an error like: ERROR Code coverage driver not available. Did you set Xdebug’s coverage mode?

This indicates that Xdebug might not be installed or configured correctly for coverage analysis.

Route::get('/test', function () {
    phpinfo();
    return 'test';
});

Visit /test in your browser and look for Xdebug details.

Navigate to Xdebug Wizard Paste the phpinfo() output into the wizard for analysis to ensure Xdebug is correctly installed.

If it’s installed locate the php.ini by searching for it in the html output.

Editing php.ini with vim

sudo nano /path/to/your/php.ini

Add or modify the following lines:

xdebug.mode = debug,coverage
xdebug.start_with_request = yes

Running Code Coverage Again

Now, execute:

php artisan test --coverage

This should now work, providing coverage statistics.