How to setup a different html output directory for coverage report with pytest?

Question

Using coverage with pytests is a very useful tool.

Html reporting allows for nice output, however through command line, can't find an option to modify the default output directory (htmlcov)

example command line:

python -m pytest lib_being_tested\tests --cov lib_being_tested.module --cov-report=html

Answer 1

This configuration option isn't part of pytest-cov.

In the configuration file for the underlying tool coverage.py, which is called .coveragerc by default, you can add:

[html]
directory = differentname

See the documentation for details: https://github.com/nedbat/coveragepy/blob/master/doc/config.rst

Answer 2

now (3 years later) you can change the default output directory directly in command line:

python -m pytest --cov --cov-report=html:reports/html_dir --cov-report=xml:reports/coverage.xml lib_being_tested.module

Missing directories are created on the fly

Simeon's answer is still relevant to choose this output directory through coverage configuration file