4. Running Kaocha CLI

If you followed the installation instructions, you should have a bin/kaocha wrapper ("binstub") in your project that accepts additional arguments.

The command line runner takes the names of test suites to run, as well as a number of flags and options. If you don't give it any suite names it runs all suites.

You can get an overview of all available flags with --test-help.

bin/kaocha --test-help

tests.edn

Kaocha relies on a tests.edn configuration file, see the section on configuration. To load an alternative configuration, use the --config-file option.

bin/kaocha --config-file tests_ci.edn

Note that plugins specified in the config file will influence the available command line options.

Plugins and reporters

The --plugin option lets you activate additional plugins, it is followed by the plugin's name, a namespaced symbol. This option can be specified multiple times.

With --reporter you can specify an alternative reporter, to change Kaocha's output.

For example, to see a colorful progress bar, use

bin/kaocha --reporter kaocha.report.progress/report

Plugins in the kaocha.plugin namespace, and reporters in the kaocha.report namespace can be specified without the namespace.

bin/kaocha --plugin profiling --reporter documentation

Fail fast mode

bin/kaocha --fail-fast

Stop the test run as soon as a single assertion fails or an exception is thrown, and then print the results so far.

Randomization

Kaocha by default randomizes the order that tests are run: it picks a random seed, and uses that to re-order the test suites, namespaces, and test vars.

Tests should be independent, but this is not always the case. This random order helps to track down unintended dependencies between tests.

The random seed will be printed at the start of the test run. On the same code base with the same seed you will always get the same test order. This way you can e.g. reproduce a test run that failed on a build server.

bin/kaocha --seed 10761431

Use --no-randomize to load suites in the order they are specified, and vars in the order they occur in the source. You can disable randomization in tests.edn

Control output

Kaocha makes liberal use of ANSI escape codes for colorizing the output. If you prefer or need plain text output use --no-color.

By default Kaocha will capture any output that occurs on stdout or stderr during a test run. Only when a test fails is the captured output printed as part of the test result summary. This is generally what you want, since this way tests that pass don't generate distracting noise. If you do want all the output as it occurs, use --no-capture-output.

Debug information

--version prints version information, whereas --test-help will print the available command line flags. Note that while the more common --help is also available, it is not usable under Clojure CLI, instead it will print the help information for Clojure itself.

Conceptually Kaocha goes through three steps: load configuration, load tests, run tests. The result of each step is a data structure. You can view these structures (EDN) with --print-config, --print-test-plan, and --print-result.

--print-config                    Print out the fully merged and normalized config, then exit.
--print-test-plan                 Load tests, build up a test plan, then print out the test plan and exit.
--print-result                    Print the test result map as returned by the Kaocha API.