Recording the Display¶

How it works¶

Scrutinizer automatically starts a virtual display for each build environment and populates the DISPLAY environment variable that you can use for running browser-based tests.

You can have Scrutinizer record a video for certain commands that aids you in debugging. Scrutinizer records this video in low overhead mode that only requires 1-5% of a CPU during recording.

If the command succeeds, the video is discarded. If it fails, we automatically encode the video so that you can view it on the build logs page in your regular browser. The encoding time depends on the video size and is done at the end of a build.

Besides, when watching the video, we automatically replay the command output so that the video and the command output are always in sync and you can for example see what test was running at that time.

Setting up the Recording¶

On auto-setup nodes, Scrutinizer automatically records a video of commands in the tests section. On minimal nodes, you can turn on recording on a per-command basis in your configuration:

build:
  nodes:
    my-node:
      commands:
        - command: ./run-functional-tests
          record_video: true

Viewing the Recording¶

When a video was recorded for a failed command, you see a View Display Recording button above the command output that you can use to view the video.

The output of the command will automatically be replayed to match the image that you see in the video: