Vitest coverage exclude: files, folders and lines

Put the pattern in test.coverage.exclude, write it from the project root and end folders with /**: src/generated/**. To ignore lines inside a file, use a /* v8 ignore */ comment.

Exclude patterns at a glance

Test files never need excluding. Vitest leaves them out of the report, even a test file inside src that your include pattern matches.

We ran every setup here with Vitest 5.1.0 and Node.js 24. The test project has four source files. One of them, src/legacy/old-pricing.ts, no test imports.

Exclude files and folders

import { defineConfig } from 'vitest/config'

export default defineConfig({
  test: {
    coverage: {
      include: ['src/**/*.ts'],
      exclude: ['src/generated/**', 'src/legacy/**'],
    },
  },
})

The report then listed two files, 9 of 9 lines. Patterns are globs matched against each file’s path from the project root.

include matters as much as exclude. By default Vitest reports only the files your tests import. Our unimported legacy file was not in the report until we added include: ['src/**/*.ts']; then it showed at 0 of 1 lines. So a file you never import is already out of the report, and it appears only when include brings it in.

Ignore lines with comments

function format(cents: number): string {
  /* v8 ignore if */
  if (cents < 0) {
    return `-${format(-cents)}`
  }
  return `${Math.floor(cents / 100)}.${String(cents % 100).padStart(2, '0')}`
}

Our receipt.ts has this hint and one /* v8 ignore next */. Without the two comments it had 3 of 5 lines and 1 of 2 branches; with them, 3 of 3 lines and no branches left to cover. next skips the next statement, and start / stop skip everything between them.

The docs suggest -- @preserve, as in /* v8 ignore if -- @preserve */, because older builds stripped comments from TypeScript. In Vitest 5.1.0 the hints worked both with and without it.

On the default V8 provider, /* istanbul ignore if */ worked too. On the Istanbul provider only istanbul hints work: the v8 ignore comments were ignored and the file went back to 3 of 5 lines.

Why your Vitest coverage exclude isn’t working

The second and third rows disagree. The docs say a pattern without a wildcard counts as a folder, and that held only for files Vitest found through include. Files your tests import need the /**. Write it every time.

You may have seen ...coverageConfigDefaults.exclude spread into exclude. In Vitest 5.1.0 it is an empty list, so it changes nothing.

What Supercov adds

npx supercov -- npx vitest run
npx supercov runs latest gaps

Supercov runs the same command and records which test covered each line, with branches and MC/DC, without Vitest’s coverage provider. It decides what counts from your source directories, not from coverage.exclude. See Vitest coverage: V8 vs Istanbul for how the two providers compare, and per-test coverage in Vitest.