Detox test reporting

@qualflare/detox reports your React Native suite from inside the run — statuses, per-attempt retry history, steps and your own metadata — and resolves whether the run targeted iOS or Android without you configuring it twice. Because Detox has no test runner of its own and drives Jest, it builds on Qualflare's Jest reporter rather than reimplementing one. What a reporter cannot see is Detox’s own artifacts directory, and qf collect --artifacts-dir attaches those screenshots, videos and device logs to the tests they came from. This guide covers the setup, why the artifacts are matched after the run rather than during it, and the hosted, historical analysis — AI failure clustering, flaky-test scoring and per-launch risk — that sits on top.

What a Detox run actually produces

Two separate things, which is the whole reason Detox reporting is usually half-done.

The first is the test results, and they are Jest’s. detox test is a wrapper that drives Jest with a Detox test environment, so everything Jest knows — which tests ran, how long each took, which attempt of a retry passed, the failure message and stack — is available to any Jest reporter listed in jest.config, exactly as it would be in a unit-test run.

The second is the artifacts, and they are Detox’s alone. Its artifact plugins write screenshots, screen recordings, device logs, instruments recordings and UI hierarchy snapshots to disk, one directory per test:

# Detox drives Jest, and writes its artifacts to ./artifacts by default
detox test --configuration ios.sim.debug \
  --take-screenshots failing \
  --record-videos failing \
  --record-logs failing

artifacts/
└── ios.sim.debug.2026-09-27 13-30-00Z/
    ├── ✓ Login should sign in/
    │   ├── test.png
    │   └── device.log
    └── ✗ Login should handle a_b paths/
        ├── test.png
        ├── test.mp4
        └── device.log

Note what is and is not in those directory names. The glyph records the result, the name is the test’s full name with anything filesystem-hostile replaced — the slash in a/b has become an underscore — and a retried test gets (2), (3) on its later invocations. There is no test number and no timestamp per test. Nothing inside the directory says which test it belongs to either: the directory name is the only link between an artifact and a result, and on its own it is just a folder on a CI machine that gets discarded with the workspace.

Why the artifacts are matched after the run

The obvious place to pick up those directories is the Jest reporter, in onRunComplete. That cannot work, and the reason is structural rather than a timing quirk worth retrying around:

• Detox finalises video, and flushes device logs, in its artifacts plugin’s onBeforeCleanup.
• That runs inside detox.cleanup().
• Detox’s Jest integration calls detox.cleanup() from Jest’s globalTeardown.
• And Jest runs globalTeardown after every reporter’s onRunComplete.

A reporter-side scan therefore runs before Detox has finished writing, and would systematically miss the videos — the single largest and most useful artifact on a failing flow. A delay or a retry inside the reporter would not fix the ordering; it would make the miss intermittent, which is harder to diagnose than missing it every time. So the scan belongs in qf collect, which runs as a separate command after the Detox process has exited. There the race does not need managing, because it does not exist.

Send Detox results to Qualflare

Install the Jest reporter — it is the reporter a Detox run needs:

npm install --save-dev @qualflare/detox

Add it to the Jest config that detox test runs, keeping Detox’s own reporter alongside it. Declaring framework: 'detox' is what makes the launch read as a Detox suite rather than a generic Jest one:

// e2e/jest.config.js — the config `detox test` runs
module.exports = {
  rootDir: '..',
  testMatch: ['<rootDir>/e2e/**/*.test.js'],
  testTimeout: 120000,
  // Keep Detox's own reporter: it is what prints progress.
  reporters: [
    'detox/runners/jest/reporter',
    '@qualflare/detox/reporter',
  ],
  globalSetup: 'detox/runners/jest/globalSetup',
  globalTeardown: 'detox/runners/jest/globalTeardown',
  testEnvironment: 'detox/runners/jest/testEnvironment',
};

Then run the suite and upload both halves in one command:

# The Jest-side report, plus Detox's artifacts directory
qf myapp collect ./qualflare-results --artifacts-dir ./artifacts

Nothing is scanned unless --artifacts-dir names a directory. ./artifacts is Detox’s default and would be an easy guess, but attaching files from a directory you did not name is how a previous run’s video ends up on today’s launch — and that mistake is invisible from the dashboard, which is exactly the kind of wrong answer worth refusing to give. Point it at the artifacts root and the newest <configuration>.<timestamp> run inside it is used; point it at one specific run directory and that one is used as given.

Video and logs are opt-in

# Screenshots upload by default. Video and device logs are opt-in,
# because either can be the largest thing in a report by an order of magnitude.
qf myapp collect ./qualflare-results \
  --artifacts-dir ./artifacts \
  --upload-artifacts video,trace

Annotate tests from inside the suite

The reporter exposes a small runtime API, so a Detox test can label itself, group its actions into steps, and attach data the screenshots do not show:

import { qualflare } from '@qualflare/detox';

it('signs in', async () => {
  qualflare.label('team', 'identity');
  qualflare.tag('smoke');

  await qualflare.step('enter credentials', async () => {
    await element(by.id('email')).typeText('[email protected]');
    await element(by.id('password')).typeText('correct horse');
  });

  await element(by.id('login')).tap();
  await expect(element(by.text('Welcome'))).toBeVisible();
});

CI: upload even when the suite fails

The single most common way to lose Detox artifacts is to let a failing detox test end the job before anything is uploaded. A red run is precisely the one whose screenshots and video you want, so the upload step has to run regardless:

# .github/workflows/e2e.yml
- name: Detox test
  run: |
    detox test --configuration ios.sim.debug \
      --take-screenshots failing --record-videos failing
  continue-on-error: true

# Runs even when the suite failed — a red run is the one whose
# screenshots and video you actually want.
- name: Upload results
  if: always()
  run: |
    qf login "$QF_PROJECT" "$QF_TOKEN" --force
    qf "$QF_PROJECT" collect ./qualflare-results \
      --artifacts-dir ./artifacts \
      --upload-artifacts video,trace

Common Detox reporting problems

Detox is one of twelve frameworks with a native Qualflare reporter behind it — in its case Jest’s, because that is genuinely what runs the tests. Weighing tools? See how Qualflare compares to other test management platforms, or browse all framework reporting guides.

Frequently asked questions