Introduction

Line and branch coverage for PHP by source instrumentation: no Xdebug, no PCOV, the suite runs at its normal speed, and branches are counted with a strict semantics that asks for both outcomes of every decision.

Why

Branch coverage in PHP has one source today, Xdebug with --path-coverage, and it is slow and heavy: it costs about 30 times the time of the suite, and php-code-coverage accumulates, on every test, the test ids on every branch and path of the loaded files, so the cost per test grows along the run. On a real Laravel suite it did not finish in an hour. PCOV is fast, but it only counts lines, and both need an extension installed on every machine that measures.

Sonda inserts probes into the code before loading it, as Istanbul does for JavaScript. Each probe is one assignment into an array; there is no opcode interception and no path enumeration, which is what makes Xdebug slow and heavy. Its numbers were validated against Xdebug path coverage on a whole real-world suite (see Comparison with Xdebug).

What you get

• Lines and branches, from the same run, with reports in HTML, Clover, Cobertura, .cov and GitLab Code Quality, built by php-code-coverage.
• No extension: Sonda is a Composer dependency, or a clone on the PATH, and uses the PHPUnit, php-code-coverage and php-parser of the measured project.
• The suite at its normal speed: measuring costs seconds, not multiples of the suite.
• Strict branch semantics: every if without else needs both outcomes tested, ?-> counts both sides, && and || need the short circuit. See Branch semantics.
• Blade views measured line by line and branch by branch, in Laravel projects. See Blade views.
• Built for CI: --changed measures only what the merge request touched and demands 100% of it; --affected runs only the tests that execute what changed. See Only what changed and Only the affected tests.

Headline numbers

The suite of a Laravel 13 project with Filament, Pest 4 and Postgres, 4,514 tests:

Run	Time	Memory
No coverage	178s	308 MB
Sonda	174s	317 MB
Xdebug, lines only	671s	640 MB
Xdebug with --path-coverage	did not finish in 63 min	more than 760 MB

With --parallel (10 workers): 42s without coverage, 40s with Sonda. The whole table, the fidelity results and how to reproduce the comparison on your own project are in Comparison with Xdebug.

Where to go next

• Getting started: requirements, installation, first run.
• CLI reference: every option.
• In CI: GitLab and GitHub Actions recipes.
• How it works: probes, cache, autoloader, workers.