# Excluding code from coverage.py

You may have code in your project that you know won’t be executed, and you want to tell coverage.py to ignore it. For example, you may have debugging-only code that won’t be executed during your unit tests. You can tell coverage.py to exclude this code during reporting so that it doesn’t clutter your reports with noise about code that you don’t need to hear about.

Coverage.py will look for comments marking clauses for exclusion. In this code, the “if debug” clause is excluded from reporting:

    a = my_function1()
    if debug:   # pragma: no cover
        msg = "blah blah"
        log_message(msg, a)
    b = my_function2()

Any line with a comment of “pragma: no cover” is excluded. If that line introduces a clause, for example, an if clause, or a function or class definition, then the entire clause is also excluded. Here the __repr__ function is not reported as missing:

    class MyObject(object):
        def __init__(self):
            blah1()
            blah2()

        def __repr__(self): # pragma: no cover
            return "<MyObject>"

Excluded code is executed as usual, and its execution is recorded in the coverage data as usual. When producing reports though, coverage.py excludes it from the list of missing code.

## Branch coverage

When measuring branch coverage, a conditional will not be counted as a branch if one of its choices is excluded:

    def only_one_choice(x):
        if x:
            blah1()
            blah2()
        else:       # pragma: no cover
            # x is always true.
            blah3()

Because the `else` clause is excluded, the `if` only has one possible next line, so it isn’t considered a branch at all.

## Advanced exclusion

Coverage.py identifies exclusions by matching lines against a list of regular expressions. Using configuration files or the coverage API, you can add to that list. This is useful if you have often-used constructs to exclude that can be matched with a regex. You can exclude them all at once without littering your code with exclusion pragmas.

For example, you might decide that __repr__ functions are usually only used in debugging code, and are uninteresting to test themselves. You could exclude all of them by adding a regex to the exclusion list:

    [report]
    exclude_lines = def __repr__

For example, here’s a list of exclusions I’ve used:

    [report]
    exclude_lines =
        pragma: no cover
        def __repr__
        if self.debug:
        if settings.DEBUG
        raise AssertionError
        raise NotImplementedError
        if 0:
        if __name__ == .__main__.:

Note that when using the `exclude_lines` option in a configuration file, you are taking control of the entire list of regexes, so you need to re-specify the default “pragma: no cover” match if you still want it to apply.

A similar pragma, “no branch”, can be used to tailor branch coverage measurement. See Branch coverage measurement for details.

## Excluding source files

See Specifying source files for ways to limit what files coverage.py measures or reports on.