Use file instead of stdout

[honzajavorek]

Currently, I first run my tests with regular reporter and then I instrument the codebase and run the test suite again, with mocha-lcov-reporter. That works, but takes twice as much time then running the tests in a regular way.

Also, some CIs (e.g. Travis CI) kill the build if there's no output for certain time, so if I redirect the stdout of mocha-lcov-reporter to a file by > as advised in README, the instrumented run gets killed - it doesn't output anything to stdout for a long time and CI sees it as a stale process.

Thus I'd like to use mocha-lcov-reporter combined together with other Mocha reporters. It's possible by creating file reporter.coffee like this (CoffeeScript, but JS would work as well):

Spec = require('mocha').reporters.Spec
LCov = require('mocha-lcov-reporter')


module.exports = (runner, options) ->
  new Spec(runner, options)
  new LCov(runner, options) if process.env.COLLECT_COVERAGE

...and then running Mocha with --reporter=test/reporter.coffee. But in this case, I need to separate lcov output and regular spec reporter output, both will get combined on stdout. I need to configure mocha-lcov-reporter to internally append the lcov results to a given file, instead of stdout.

I looked into the code of your lcov reporter and there seems to be no easy way not only configure the reporter, but even monkey-patching isn't possible, as all the important functionality happens in externally inaccessible functions.

@StevenLooman What do you think about this feature? How would you approach implementing it? I'm willing to contribute it, if you give me some pointers.

[StevenLooman]

Thank you for the issue, @honzajavorek . If I remember correctly, an issue requesting support for running multiple reporters at the same time was opened before, but I can't seem to find it.

As far as I know, mocha doesn't provide any means to use multiple reporters at the same time. However, a quick Google given reporters such as mocha-multi-reporters. A composite reporter is a great idea, either your own or one pre-existing.

As soon as I have the time I'll make the reporter either monkey-patchable, by using a separate function to write output, and/or make it configurable to write to a file or stdout.

[StevenLooman]

@honzajavorek Only made it monkey-patchable for now. Can you verify this fits your needs?

[honzajavorek]

@StevenLooman You are correct Mocha doesn't really support multiple reporters (yet or very well, considering my approach to be rather workaround). mocha-multi-reporters and similar ones are exactly where I've got inspired with my solution.

The changes you made in fe526ff are exactly what I need. It's really great. This way I'll just override the write method and I'm done.

[StevenLooman]

@honzajavorek Great. I have just release version 1.3.0 of mocha-lcov-reporter to npmjs.

[honzajavorek]

Thank you! 🎉