Produce an easy-to-read summary of your project's test data as part of your GitHub Actions CI/CD workflow. This helps you understand at-a-glance the impact to the changes in your pull requests, and see which changes are introducing new problems.

• Integrates easily with your existing GitHub Actions workflow
• Produces summaries from JUnit XML and TAP test output
• Compatible with most testing tools for most development platforms
• Produces step outputs, so you can pass summary data to other actions
• Customizable to show just a summary, just failed tests, or all test results
• Output can go to the GitHub job summary (default), to a file or stdout

To set up the test summary action, just add a few lines of YAML to your GitHub Actions workflow. For example, if your test harness produces JUnit XML outputs in the test/results/ directory, and you want the output attached to the job summary, add a new step to your workflow YAML after your build and test step:

- name: Test Summary
  uses: test-summary/action@v2
  with:
    paths: "test/results/**/TEST-*.xml"
  if: always()

Update paths to match the test output file(s) that your test harness produces. You can specify glob patterns, including ** to match the pattern recursively. In addition, you can specify multiple test paths on multiple lines. For example:

- name: Test Summary
  uses: test-summary/action@v2
  with:
    paths: |
      test-one/**/TEST-*.xml
      test-two/results/results.tap
  if: always()

Note the if: always() conditional in this workflow step: you should always use this so that the test summary creation step runs even if the previous steps have failed. This allows your test step to fail -- due to failing tests -- but still produce a test summary.

You can also generate the summary in a GitHub-flavored Markdown (GFM) file, and upload it as a build artifact, add it to a pull request comment, or add it to an issue. Use the output parameter to define the target file.

For example, to create a summary and upload the markdown as a build artifact:

- name: Test Summary
  uses: test-summary/action@v2
  with:
    paths: "test/results/**/TEST-*.xml"
    output: test-summary.md
  if: always()

- name: Upload test summary
  uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
  with:
    name: test-summary
    path: test-summary.md
  if: always()

This action also generates several outputs you can reference in other steps, or even from your job or workflow. These outputs are passed, failed, skipped, and total.

For example, you may want to send a summary to Slack:

- name: Test Summary
  id: test_summary
  uses: test-summary/action@v2
  with:
    paths: "test/results/**/TEST-*.xml"
  if: always()
- name: Notify Slack
  uses: slackapi/[email protected]
  with:
    payload: |-
      {
        "message": "${{ steps.test_summary.outputs.passed }}/${{ steps.test_summary.outputs.total }} tests passed"
      }
  if: always()

There are examples for setting up a GitHub Actions step with many different platforms in the examples repository.

Options are specified on the with map of the action.

• paths: the paths for input files (required)
  One or more file glob patterns that specify the test results files in JUnit XML or TAP format.

  • To specify a single file, provide it directly as a string value to the paths key. For example:

    - uses: test-summary/action@v2
      with:
        paths: "tests/results.xml"

  • To specify multiple files, provide them as a multi-line string value to the paths key. For example:

    - uses: test-summary/action@v2
      with:
        paths: |
          tests-one/results.xml
          tests-two/results.xml
          tests-three/results.xml

  • You can specify files as a glob patterns, allowing you to use wildcards to match multiple files. For example, to match all files named TEST-*.xml beneath the tests folder, recursively:

    - uses: test-summary/action@v2
      with:
        paths: "test/results/**/TEST-*.xml"

• output: the output file to create (optional)
  This is the path to the output file to populate with the test summary markdown data. For example:

  - uses: test-summary/action@v2
    with:
      paths: "test/results/**/TEST-*.xml"
      output: "test/results/summary.md"

  If this is not specified, the output will be to the workflow summary.

  This file is GitHub Flavored Markdown (GFM) and may include permitted HTML.

• show: the test results to summarize in a table (optional) This controls whether a test summary table is created or not, as well as what tests are included. It could be all, none, pass, skip, or fail. The default is fail - that is, the summary table will only show the failed tests. For example, if you wanted to show failed and skipped tests:

  - uses: test-summary/action@v2
    with:
      paths: "test/results/**/TEST-*.xml"
      show: "fail, skip"

• How is the summary graphic generated? Does any of my data ever leave GitHub?
  None of your data ever leaves GitHub. Test results are read within GitHub Actions by the test-summary action, and a link to an SVG with the test results numbers is created. This the graphic is both fetched and subsequently cached by GitHub's image service. This service provides no referral information to remote hosts. This means that no information at all about your workflow - the repository name, test results, or other information - is available to the image generator service.

Have questions? Need help? Visit the discussion forum.

Copyright (c) 2022 Edward Thomson. Available under the MIT license.