Upload Code Coverage

Upload a Cobertura XML coverage report to GitHub's code coverage API.

Usage

- uses: actions/upload-code-coverage@v1
  with:
    file: cobertura.xml
    language: Java
    label: code-coverage/jacoco

The action handles everything else automatically: gzip/base64 encoding, resolving the correct commit SHA and ref, detecting PR number (from both pull_request and push events), and calling the upload API.

Inputs

Input	Required	Default	Description
file	Yes		Path to the Cobertura XML coverage report
language	Yes		Linguist language name (e.g. Java, Go, Python)
label	Yes		Label for the report (e.g. code-coverage/jacoco)
fail-on-error	No	true	Whether to fail the workflow step if the upload fails
token	No	github.token	GitHub token with code-quality:write permission

Permissions

The calling workflow or job must grant code-quality: write. The action cannot declare this itself.

permissions:
  contents: read
  code-quality: write

For push-only workflows where the action looks up PR numbers via gh pr list, also add pull-requests: read.

Error handling

By default, the action fails the workflow step (exits with code 1) when the upload is unsuccessful. This ensures you notice when coverage data is not being stored.

If coverage upload is best-effort in your workflow and you don't want a transient API failure to block CI, set fail-on-error: false:

- uses: actions/upload-code-coverage@v1
  with:
    file: cobertura.xml
    language: Java
    label: code-coverage/jacoco
    fail-on-error: false

When fail-on-error is false, upload errors are still surfaced as ::error:: annotations in the workflow log, but the step exits 0.

Event handling

The action auto-detects the event type and resolves the correct values:

• pull_request / pull_request_target: Uses the PR head SHA and ref (not the merge commit), and includes the PR number.
• push: Uses github.sha and github.ref, and looks up whether the branch has an open PR via gh pr list.

This means it works with both patterns — workflows triggered by pull_request and push-only workflows that serve PRs via branch pushes.

Full example (separate upload job)

name: CI

on:
  push:
    branches: [main]
  pull_request:

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
        with:
          ref: ${{ github.event.pull_request.head.sha || github.sha }}

      # ... build and generate cobertura.xml ...

      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        if: github.event_name != 'pull_request' || github.event.pull_request.head.repo.full_name == github.repository
        with:
          name: cobertura-report
          path: cobertura.xml

  upload-coverage:
    needs: build
    if: ${{ !cancelled() && needs.build.result == 'success' && (github.event_name != 'pull_request' || github.event.pull_request.head.repo.full_name == github.repository) }}
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    permissions:
      contents: read
      code-quality: write
    steps:
      - uses: actions/download-artifact@v4
        with:
          name: cobertura-report

      - uses: actions/upload-code-coverage@v1
        with:
          file: cobertura.xml
          language: Java
          label: code-coverage/jacoco

Caveats

• Fork PRs are not supported. Pull requests from forks don't have write access to the base repository, so the action cannot upload coverage. When a fork PR is detected, the action exits gracefully with a notice — it won't fail your CI.
• Merge queue runs are skipped. Coverage should be uploaded for PRs and the default branch, making merge queue uploads unnecessary. The action logs a warning and exits successfully.