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Trace Viewer

Selenium Boot generates a standalone, self-contained HTML trace viewer per test with an interactive step timeline, per-step screenshots, final-state failure snapshot, and full error details — with zero external CDN dependencies.

Enabling Trace Recording​

Trace recording is opt-in and configured in selenium-boot.yml:

selenium-boot.yml
tracing:
  enabled: true
  captureOnPass: false  # set true to generate traces for passing tests too

When enabled, a self-contained HTML file is generated for each failed test at:

target/traces/{ClassName}/{testMethod}-trace.html

(Or build/traces/... in Gradle projects, honoring -Dseleniumboot.reports.dir).

What the Trace Viewer captures​

Each trace file is an independent, single-file HTML document featuring:

  1. Metadata header — test method name, class, browser name, duration in milliseconds, status badge, and timestamp.
  2. Interactive step timeline — every named step recorded via StepLogger.step(...) appears in the timeline with its offset. Steps that captured screenshots display a camera icon (📷) and open the interactive screenshot panel on click.
  3. Final-state screenshot — full-browser screenshot captured automatically at the exact moment of test failure.
  4. Failure details — highlighted error message and full scrollable stack trace.
  5. Zero CDN dependencies — CSS styles and interactive JavaScript are completely inlined so traces can be viewed offline, archived, or shared without broken assets.

Viewing traces​

From the HTML report​

In the main Selenium Boot HTML report (target/selenium-boot-report.html), every failed test in the Failures tab features a View Trace link in its failure detail panel that opens the corresponding trace file.

Directly from the file system​

Open target/traces/{ClassName}/{testMethod}-trace.html in any modern web browser.

In GitHub Actions​

When running in GitHub Actions and tracing.enabled: true is on, failed tests are automatically summarized in a Markdown table appended to $GITHUB_STEP_SUMMARY:

TestErrorTrace
com.example.CartTest.testCheckoutTimeout waiting for elementtarget/traces/CartTest/testCheckout-trace.html

This lets teams triage failures and locate the corresponding HTML trace file directly on the Actions job summary page without downloading and extracting artifact archives.