Instrumentation

In this section, we will explain how define and use instrumentation backends (such as bisect_ppx or landmarks) so that you can enable and disable coverage via dune-workspace files or by passing a command-line flag or environment variable. In addition to providing an easy way to toggle instrumentation of your code, this setup avoids creating a hard dependency on the precise instrumentation backend in your project.

Specifying what to instrument

When an instrumentation backend is activated, Dune will only instrument libraries and executables for which the user has requested instrumentation.

To request instrumentation, one must add the following field to a library or executable stanza:

(library
 (name ...)
 (instrumentation
  (backend <name> <args>)))

The backend <name> can be passed arguments using <args>.

This field can be repeated multiple times in order to support various backends. For instance:

(library
 (name foo)
 (modules foo)
 (instrumentation (backend bisect_ppx --bisect-silent yes))
 (instrumentation (backend landmarks)))

This will instruct Dune that when either the bisect_ppx or landmarks instrumentation is activated, the library should be instrumented with this backend.

By default, these fields are simply ignored. However, when the corresponding instrumentation backend is activated, Dune will implicitly add the relevant ppx rewriter to the list of ppx rewriters.

At the moment, it is not possible to instrument code that is preprocessed via an action preprocessors. As these preprocessors are quite rare nowadays, there is no plan to add support for them in the future.

Enabling/disabling instrumentation

Activating an instrumentation backend can be done via the command line or the dune-workspace file.

Via the command line, it is done as follows:

$ dune build --instrument-with <names>

Here <names> is a comma-separated list of instrumentation backends. For example:

$ dune build --instrument-with bisect_ppx,landmarks

This will instruct Dune to activate the given backend globally, i.e. in all defined build contexts.

It is also possible to enable instrumentation backends via the dune-workspace file, either globally, or for specific builds contexts.

To enable an instrumentation backend globally, you can type in your dune-workspace file:

(lang dune 2.8)
(instrument_with bisect_ppx)

or for each context individually:

(lang dune 2.8)
(context default)
(context (default (name coverage) (instrument_with bisect_ppx)))
(context (default (name profiling) (instrument_with landmarks)))

If both the global and local fields are present, the precedence is the same as for the profile field: the per-context setting takes precedence over the command-line flag, which takes precedence over the global field.

Declaring an instrumentation backend

Instrumentation backends are libraries with the special field (instrumentation.backend). This field instructs Dune that the library can be used as an intrumentation backend and also provides the parameters that are specific to this backend.

Currently, Dune will only support ppx instrumentation tools, and the instrumentation library must specify the ppx rewriters that instruments the code. This can be done as follows:

(library
 ...
 (instrumentation.backend
   (ppx <ppx-rewriter-name>)))

When such an instrumentation backend is activated, Dune will implicitly add the mentioned ppx rewriter to the list of ppx rewriters for libraries and executables that specify this instrumentation backend.