Buildkite Test Engine Client

Buildkite Test Engine Client (bktec) is an open source tool to orchestrate your test suites. It uses your Buildkite Test Engine suite data to intelligently partition and parallelize your tests.

bktec supports multiple test runners and offers various features to enhance your testing workflow. Below is a comparison of the features supported by each test runner:

Feature	Rspec	Jest	Playwright	Cypress
Filter test files	✅	✅	✅	✅
Automatically retry failed test	✅	✅	✅	❌
Split slow files by individual test example	✅	❌	❌	❌

Installation

The latest version of bktec can be downloaded from https://github.com/buildkite/test-engine-client/releases

Supported OS/Architecture

ARM and AMD architecture for linux and darwin

The available Go binaries

• bktec-darwin-amd64
• bktec-darwin-arm64
• bktec-linux-amd64
• bktec-linux-arm64

Using bktec

Buildkite Pipeline environment variables

bktec uses the following Buildkite Pipeline provided environment variables.

Environment Variable	Description
BUILDKITE_BUILD_ID	The UUID of the Buildkite build. bktec uses this UUID along with BUILDKITE_STEP_ID to uniquely identify the test plan.
BUILDKITE_JOB_ID	The UUID of the job in Buildkite build.
BUILDKITE_ORGANIZATION_SLUG	The slug of your Buildkite organization.
BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB	The index number of a parallel job created from a Buildkite parallel build step. Make sure you configure parallelism in your pipeline definition. You can read more about Buildkite parallel build step on this page.
BUILDKITE_PARALLEL_JOB_COUNT	The total number of parallel jobs created from a Buildkite parallel build step. Make sure you configure parallelism in your pipeline definition. You can read more about Buildkite parallel build step on this page.
BUILDKITE_STEP_ID	The UUID of the step group in Buildkite build. bktec uses this UUID along with BUILDKITE_BUILD_ID to uniquely identify the test plan.

Important

Please make sure that the above environment variables are available in your testing environment, particularly if you use Docker or some other type of containerization to run your tests.

Create API access token

To use bktec, you need a Buildkite API access token with read_suites, read_test_plan, and write_test_plan scopes. You can generate this token from your Personal Settings in Buildkite. After creating the token, set the BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_API_ACCESS_TOKEN environment variable with the token value.

export BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_API_ACCESS_TOKEN=token

Configure Test Engine suite slug

To use bktec, you need to configure the BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_SUITE_SLUG environment variable with your Test Engine suite slug. You can find the suite slug in the URL of your suite. For example, in the URL https://buildkite.com/organizations/my-organization/analytics/suites/my-suite, the slug is my-suite.

export BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_SUITE_SLUG=my-slug

Configure the test runner

To configure the test runner for bktec, please refer to the detailed guides provided for each supported test runner. You can find the guides at the following links:

• RSpec
• Jest
• Playwright
• Cypress

Running bktec

Please download the executable and make it available in your testing environment. To parallelize your tests in your Buildkite build, you can amend your pipeline step configuration to:

steps:
  - name: "Rspec"
    command: ./bktec
    parallelism: 10
    env:
      BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_SUITE_SLUG: my-suite
      BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_API_ACCESS_TOKEN: your-secret-token
      BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_TEST_RUNNER: rspec
      BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_RESULT_PATH: tmp/result.json

Tip

You can find example configurations and usage instructions for each test runner in our examples repository.

Debugging

To enable debug mode, set the BUILDKITE_TEST_ENGINE_DEBUG_ENABLED environment variable to true. This will print detailed output to assist in debugging bktec.

Possible exit statuses

bktec may exit with a variety of exit statuses, outlined below:

• If there is a configuration error, bktec will exit with status 16.
• If the test runner (e.g. RSpec) exits cleanly, the exit status of the runner is returned. This will likely be 0 for successful test runs, 1 for failing test runs, but may be any other error status returned by the runner.
• If the test runner is terminated by an OS level signal, such as SIGSEGV or SIGABRT, the exit status returned will be equal to 128 plus the signal number. For example, if the runner raises a SIGSEGV, the exit status will be (128 + 11) = 139.