GitHub Annotations Support

Fedor Korotkov
CirrusLabs
Published in
2 min readApr 22, 2019

While working on a new functionality or fixing an issue it’s crucial to get CI feedback as soon as possible. Fast CI builds are important but it’s also important how fast one can find a reason of a failing build. Usual flow requires to open a separate page for the failing CI build and scroll through all the logs to finally find a relevant error message. How inefficient!

Today Cirrus CI starts supporting GitHub Annotations to provide inline feedback right where you review your code. No need to switch context anymore!

Example of JUnit Annotations

This became possible as a result of recently added features like execution behaviour and artifacts. Now each artifact can specify a format so it can be parsed into annotations. Here is an example of .cirrus.yml file which saves and annotates JUnit reports of a Gradle build:

container:  
image: gradle:jdk8
check_task:
script: gradle check
always:
junit_artifacts:
path: "**/test-results/**/*.xml"
format: junit
Task with JUnit artifacts

Currently Cirrus CI can only parse JUnit XML but many tools use this format already. Please let us know what kind of formats Cirrus CI should support next! The annotation parser is also open source and contributions are highly appreciated! 😉

We highly encourage everyone to try Cirrus CI. It’s free for public repositories and all organizations get 200 CPU hours worth of compute credits to try it on private repositories.

As always don’t hesitate to ping support or ask any questions on Twitter.

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