Robot Framework

A guide for generating Trunk-compatible test reports for 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.

Checklist

By the end of this guide, you should achieve the following before proceeding to the next steps to configure your CI provider.

Generate a compatible test report
Configure the report file path or glob
Disable retries for better detection accuracy
Test uploads locally

After correctly generating reports following the above steps, you'll be ready to move on to the next steps to configure uploads in CI.

Generating Reports

Trunk detects flaky tests by analyzing test reports automatically uploaded from your CI jobs. You can do this by generating Trunk-compatible XML reports from your test runs.

To output compatible repports, 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 CLI. If you don't have it installed already, you can install and run the validate command like this:

curl -fsSLO --retry 3 https://trunk.io/releases/trunk && chmod +x trunk
./trunk flakytests 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:

curl -fsSLO --retry 3 https://trunk.io/releases/trunk && chmod +x trunk
./trunk flakytests 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.