Reporting and exit codes

Output

✓ hermes v1 hermes-v250829098.0.16 · prebuilt darwin-arm64 · ~/.argus/cache/…/bin/hermes

Cart
  ✓ starts empty
  ✓ adds an item
  ✗ applies a discount  — expected 450 but received 500
    at src/cart.test.ts:24:28
  ✎ handles refunds
  ○ flaky on CI

3 passed, 1 failed, 1 todo, 5 total (52 ms in Hermes)

  ✓ money.test.ts
  ✗ cart.test.ts (test failure)
    ✗ applies a discount  — expected 450 but received 500
      at src/cart.test.ts:24:28

2 files: 1 passed, 1 failed
9 tests: 7 passed, 1 failed, 1 todo

Glyph	Status
✓	passed
✗	failed
✎	todo
○	skipped

The duration is time inside Hermes, not wall-clock for the whole run. Bundling, provisioning and process spawn are excluded, so the number tells you about your code rather than about your machine’s disk.

stdout and stderr

Passing output and the summary go to stdout. Failures and diagnostics go to stderr.

That split is not cosmetic — it lets you pipe a run’s report somewhere machine-readable while failures still land where a human or a CI annotator looks for them.

Your own console.log output is captured per file and printed under a [user logs] heading rather than interleaved with the report, so a chatty test cannot make the results unreadable.

Outcomes

Each file produces exactly one outcome. The distinction that matters: a failing test is not a broken runner.

Outcome	Meaning	Exit
passed	Every test in the file passed	0
failed	The suite ran; some tests failed	1
timeout	The Hermes process outlived --timeout	2
infrastructure-failure	Bundling, provisioning or spawning broke	2
protocol-failure	No valid result frame came back	2

Conflating “your assertion was wrong” (1) with “the runner could not run” (2) is how CI pipelines end up green on a broken toolchain. Argus keeps them apart everywhere: in the outcome type, in the exit code, and in the wording.

infrastructure-failure

✗ INFRASTRUCTURE FAILURE [bundle] Could not resolve "./missing"

The stage is named in brackets — provision, bundle, spawn, discover. Something before or around your test broke; your tests never ran, or never finished.

protocol-failure

✗ PROTOCOL FAILURE [no-frame]
--- raw stdout ---
<everything the process printed>

The Hermes process exited without producing exactly one valid result frame. Raw stdout is dumped in full, because when the protocol breaks the only useful thing left is everything.

A non-zero Hermes exit is an infrastructure failure even if a frame was printed earlier — a process that crashed after reporting did not really report.

Session exit code

The worst case across every file: 2 beats 1 beats 0.

A session with zero files exits 2. Matching nothing is far more often a wrong glob than a genuinely empty suite, and exiting 0 on it turns a typo into a green build.

In CI

The provisioning line is one line by design so it survives in a log. It is worth reading in CI specifically — it is the difference between “our tests pass on Hermes V1, the engine we ship” and “our tests pass on whatever binary happened to be on the runner”.

- run: pnpm exec argus "src/**/*.test.ts"

No flags needed for CI. Argus never prompts, never opens an interactive picker, and never waits on input — a prompt in CI is a hang.

Reporters

Output is terminal-only today. Pluggable reporters — JSON and JUnit for CI consumption — are on the roadmap for v0.3.0.