How to use PHP_CodeCoverage without PHPUnit?

After some experiments, this is what I've developed.

First, you need to use PHP_CodeCoverage as described into the documentation. After the end of the coverage code analysis, you can serialize the PHP_CodeCoverage object into a temporary file. Here I am using uniqid so as to have a unique name for each request. You need to instrument your code with the snippet below into a common script of your application (the first part where the request starts, and the second part where it ends):

require_once "phpcov/vendor/autoload.php";
$filter = new PHP_CodeCoverage_Filter();
$filter->addDirectoryToBlacklist(__DIR__ . "/phpcov");
$token = uniqid();
$coverage = new PHP_CodeCoverage(null, $filter);
$coverage->start($token);

//Do something

$coverage->stop();

$s = serialize($coverage);
file_put_contents('tmp/' . $token, $s);

When my testing campaign is finnished, I can merge all the temporary files into the same PHP_CodeCoverage_Report_HTML:

require_once "phpcov/vendor/autoload.php";
$coverage = new PHP_CodeCoverage();

$files = glob('tmp/*');
foreach($files as $file) {
    $s = file_get_contents($file);
    $data = unserialize($s);
    $coverage->merge($data);
}

$writer = new PHP_CodeCoverage_Report_HTML;
$writer->process($coverage, 'report-coverage');

Don't forget to set PHP_CodeCoverage_Filter so as to eliminate all unwanted scripts of your framework and of the many libraries you may use.

If you are using CodeIgniter, you can rely on hooks as I did for my project.