RSpec (Manual Uploads)

A guide for generating Trunk-compatible test reports for RSpec without using Trunk's RSpec plugin

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

We highly recommend using Trunk's RSpec plugin to upload test results for the best accuracy when detecting flaky tests.

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 for your Rspec tests by generating JUnit XML reports from your test runs.

To generate Trunk-compatible reports, install the rspec_junit_formatter:

gem install rspec_junit_formatter

You can use rspec_junit_formatter like this:

rspec --format RspecJunitFormatter --out junit.xml

Report File Path

The JUnit report will be written to the location specified by the --out argument. In the example above, the report would be at ./junit.xml. You will need this when you update your CI config to integrate with Trunk.

Disable Retries

You need to disable automatic retries if you previously enabled them. Retries compromise the accurate detection of flaky tests.

If you have a step in CI to rerun failed tests with the --only-failures option, or you're using a package like rspec-retry, remember to disable them.

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.