Robot Framework

You can automatically detect and manage flaky tests in your projects running tests with Robot by integrating with Trunk. This document explains how to configure Robot to output JUnit XML reports that can be uploaded to Trunk for analysis.

Setup steps

Work through the steps below in order. Once you’ve finished the last one, you’ll be ready to move on to configure uploads in CI.

Generate a compatible test report

Configure the report file path or glob

Disable retries for better detection accuracy

Test uploads locally

Generating Reports

Trunk detects flaky tests by analyzing test results automatically uploaded from your CI jobs. You can do this by generating Trunk-compatible XML reports from your test runs. To output compatible reports, add the --xunit argument to your robot command:

robot --xunit=junit.xml TestSuite.robot

Report File Path

The JUnit report will be written to the location specified by the --xunit argument. In the example above, it would be at ./junit.xml.

Disable Retries

You need to disable automatic retries if you previously enabled them. Retries compromise the accurate detection of flaky tests. You should disable them and prefer using the Quarantine feature to mitigate the negative impact of Flaky Tests. Omit the --rerunfailed flag and remove any RetryFailed Listeners previously configured to run as part of your CI pipeline to disable retries.

Try It Locally

The Validate Command

You can validate your test reports using the Trunk Analytics CLI. If you don’t have it installed already, you can install and run the validate command like this:

SKU="trunk-analytics-cli-x86_64-unknown-linux.tar.gz"
curl -fL --retry 3 \
  "https://github.com/trunk-io/analytics-cli/releases/latest/download/${SKU}" \
  | tar -xz

chmod +x trunk-analytics-cli
./trunk-analytics-cli validate --junit-paths "./junit.xml"

This will not upload anything to Trunk. To improve detection accuracy, you should address all errors and warnings before proceeding to the next steps.

Test Upload

Before modifying your CI jobs to automatically upload test results to Trunk, try uploading a single test run manually. You make an upload to Trunk using the following command:

./trunk-analytics-cli upload --junit-paths "./junit.xml" \
    --org-url-slug <TRUNK_ORG_SLUG> \
    --token <TRUNK_ORG_TOKEN>

You can find your Trunk organization slug and token in the settings or by following these instructions. After your upload, you can verify that Trunk has received and processed it successfully in the Uploads tab. Warnings will be displayed if the report has issues.