Feature request: select CI-friendly failure output by default

[ratatui-user]

Motivation

When a GitHub Actions test job fails, I click through to the failed step and land near the end of nextest's output. With nextest's default configuration, the end contains the final test disposition, while the actionable failure output was printed earlier and may be far up the log.

The current workaround is to configure every repository using nextest with:

[profile.ci]
failure-output = "final"

This places the actionable failure details near the end of the log, which makes GitHub's default navigation substantially more useful. However, this is repetitive configuration for what seems like a reasonable zero-configuration CI default.

Proposal

When nextest detects a CI environment and the user has not explicitly selected a profile, automatically select a built-in default-ci profile with:

[profile.default-ci]
failure-output = "final"

The selection precedence could be:

1. An explicit --profile or NEXTEST_PROFILE.
2. default-miri when running under Miri.
3. default-ci when running in a detected CI environment.
4. default otherwise.

This should remain fully overridable through an explicit profile, repository configuration, environment variables, or command-line output options. For example, a user who prefers immediate failure output in CI could continue to select default or set failure-output = "immediate".

This proposal is intentionally limited to presentation behavior. It would not automatically change execution behavior such as fail-fast.

Nextest already depends on is_ci and uses CI detection to adjust reporter behavior. It also automatically selects default-miri based on the execution environment, and the default-* profile namespace is reserved for built-in profiles. A built-in, automatically selected default-ci profile appears consistent with those existing patterns.

Alternatives

Configure each repository

Repositories can continue defining and explicitly selecting their own CI profiles:

[profile.ci]
failure-output = "final"

cargo nextest run --profile ci

This works today, but requires repeated configuration across every repository using nextest.

Change display behavior without selecting a profile

Nextest could special-case failure-output inside the reporter whenever CI is detected, without selecting a profile. A profile seems preferable because it makes the selected behavior visible in the run header, provides a straightforward escape hatch, and creates a natural place for other carefully considered CI presentation defaults in the future.

Display failure output both immediately and at the end

Nextest could use failure-output = "immediate-final" in CI. This retains immediate feedback while also putting actionable output at the end of the log, but it duplicates potentially large failure output.

Emit GitHub Actions annotations

Nextest could detect GitHub Actions and emit workflow commands such as:

::error file=src/lib.rs,line=42,col=5,title=crate::failing_test::assertion failed

This could create a source-linked annotation for each failed test, allowing users to jump directly from the workflow summary to the likely failure location.

Nextest already heuristically extracts relevant panic and error output for JUnit reporting, so some of the required failure-identification machinery exists. Producing useful annotations would still require extracting a structured repository-relative path, line, and column from test output.

Annotations also have limitations:

• They are specific to GitHub Actions rather than CI systems generally.
• Not every failure has a meaningful source location.
• Panic output is heuristic and may be changed by custom panic hooks.
• Caught panics, should_panic tests, retries, and property tests can contain panic-like output that should not become annotations unless the test's final result is a failure.
• GitHub limits the number of annotations displayed for a workflow.
• Test names and messages would need workflow-command escaping.
• Nextest would need a clear opt-out and should avoid emitting vendor-specific control sequences into ordinary captured or redirected output.

Annotations could be complementary rather than mutually exclusive: a CI-friendly failure-output default would improve the underlying log for every CI provider, while an optional GitHub reporter could provide richer navigation where supported.

Additional context

This is not a request for GitHub annotations or GitHub-specific workflow commands. The causal problem is simpler: clicking through to a failed GitHub Actions step lands near the bottom of the log, so the bottom should contain the failure details needed to begin debugging rather than only the final nextest disposition.

[sunshowers]

Thanks for the feature request. In general I deliberately do not do this kind of auto-detection within nextest, because I think it's important that you can copy-paste a command-line from CI and have the same experience locally. I've been frustrated many times by this exact issue.) The only exception is for showing the progress bar which is truly transient state.

Besides, I don't actually think failure-output = "final" is the best default anyway, because sometimes (especially when repeatedly iterating on a commit) you want to see the CI failure result as it happens rather than at the very end.

[sunshowers]

Also, in the future, please file issues in your own writing rather than using an LLM.