Console & exit codes

The console reporter is what you see in your terminal when you run tales test. It is human-readable, ANSI-coloured by default, and designed for both interactive debugging and CI log scanning.

What it prints

Preflight (stderr)

Immediately on startup, before any scenario runs, Tales writes a single line to stderr summarising the load:

tales: loaded 12 scenarios from 5 files; timeout=disabled

This is the line to grep for “did Tales actually find my tests” and “did I forget —timeout”.

Progress events (stderr)

While the runner is in flight, scenario start / end events stream on stderr:

▶ Create blog post
▶ Use keyword
✔ Use keyword (231ms)
✔ Create blog post (842ms)

Silence this with --no-progress if your CI swallows stderr.

With --verbose, Tales adds a heartbeat every 30 seconds listing scenarios still running:

heartbeat (30s): 2 scenarios still in flight
  - Create blog post (running for 32.1s)
  - SQL preconditions  (running for 28.7s)

Final report (stdout)

After the suite finishes, the full report goes to stdout:

Scenario Create blog post (e2e/pass/blog.tales) PASS in 842ms
  ✔ create_user        POST   /users        201   312ms
  ✔ create_post        POST   /blog/posts   201   418ms
  ✔ delete_user        DELETE /users/abc    204   112ms  (teardown)

Summary: scenarios 12 passed / 0 failed / 0 skipped, steps 47 passed / 0 failed
Duration: 1.24s

Failed steps include a diagnostic block pointing at the JSON path that mismatched, with want vs got side by side.

Flags

Flag	Effect
--no-color	Strip ANSI colour codes. Use this when piping to a file or CI log that does not strip them itself.
--no-progress	Disable scenario start / end progress events on stderr.
--verbose	Add a 30s heartbeat listing in-flight scenarios.

Timeout reporting

If --timeout fires before the suite completes, Tales prints the list of in-flight scenarios so you know exactly what stalled:

tales: global --timeout (5m) exceeded
in-flight at deadline:
  - Create blog post (running for 5m0s)

The exit code is 1 in this case (treated as a failure).

Exit codes

CLI exit codes are part of the public contract. CI pipelines can rely on them.

Code	Meaning
0	All scenarios passed (skipped also counts as ok).
1	At least one scenario failed.
2	Parse or validation error.
3	Runtime or reporting fatal error.

Note

Skipped scenarios never fail the suite. There is currently no --fail-on-all-skipped flag, if every scenario ends in skipped, the exit code is still 0.

Pairing with machine-readable reports

The console reporter is always on. To also emit structured outputs for CI dashboards, add one or more of:

• --report-junit <path>, JUnit XML for Jenkins, GitLab CI, etc.
• --report-jsonl <path>, newline-delimited JSON event stream.
• --report-html <path>, single-file visual HTML report.

See CI integration for end-to-end recipes.