Behave Modern Console Report

A modern console report formatter for Behave that provides rich terminal output with colors, progress indicators, execution summaries, timings, and failure diagnostics.

Inspired by modern developer tools such as Playwright CLI, pytest, and Cargo.

Table of Contents

• Features
• Formatters
• Installation
• Quick start
• Configuration
• Example output
• CI/CD
• Architecture
• Documentation
• Development
• Changelog
• License

Features

• Six formatters: modern-console, modern-console-live, progress, log, ci, and minimal — each designed for a different use case.
• Real-time output: Live scenario status updates as tests execute.
• Progress bar: Completion percentage and scenario count during execution.
• Colored status icons: Unicode icons (✓ ✗ ⏭ ? P ◌) with color-coded results via Rich.
• Failure diagnostics: Scenario name, error type, short message, and optional traceback.
• Per-formatter configuration: mcr.<formatter>.<key> with global mcr.<key> fallback.
• CI-friendly: The ci formatter produces compact, log-friendly output with colored status tags.
• Lightweight: Only rich as an external dependency (besides behave).
• Cross-platform: Works on Windows, macOS, and Linux. Output is always UTF-8-safe, so Unicode icons never crash on non-UTF-8 terminals or when redirected to a file.

Formatters

Formatter examples

modern-console — grouped by feature with steps:

🚀 Behave Modern Console Report
Running scenarios...


Feature: Authentication

  ✓ Login  (602ms)
    ✓ Given I am on the login page
    ✓ When I enter valid credentials  (602ms)
    ✓ Then I should be logged in
  ✗ Locked account shows error  (604ms)
    ✓ Given I am on the login page
    ✓ When I enter credentials for a locked account  (604ms)
    ✗ Then I should see an error message
      Invalid credentials
  ⏭ Login with social provider
    ⏭ Given I am on the login page
    ⏭ When I choose to login with OAuth
    ⏭ Then I should be logged in

RESULTS

  Passed   18
  Failed   1
  Skipped  1

  ⏱ Duration 9.1s

Failures

✗ Locked account shows error
  Feature: Authentication, scenario at line 25
  AssertionError
  Invalid credentials
  ASSERT FAILED: Invalid credentials

progress — single-line live update:

████████████████████ 100% 20/20 - done

log — timestamped lines:

[2026-06-30 12:00:01] [PASSED] Scenario passed: Login (602ms)
[2026-06-30 12:00:02] [FAILED] Scenario failed: Locked account shows error (604ms)
[2026-06-30 12:00:02] [SKIPPED] Scenario skipped: Login with social provider (0ms)

ci — colored status tags (with Feature / Scenario context):

[PASSED] Authentication / Login (602ms)
[FAILED] Authentication / Locked account shows error (604ms)
[SKIPPED] Authentication / Login with social provider (0ms)

████████████████████ 100% 20/20 scenarios

RESULTS

  Passed   18
  Failed   1
  Skipped  1

  ⏱ Duration 9.1s

minimal — plain text only:

[PASSED] Login (602ms)
[FAILED] Locked account shows error (604ms)
[SKIPPED] Login with social provider (0ms)
RESULTS
  Passed 18
  Failed 1
  Skipped 1
  Duration 9.1s

Installation

Install from PyPI:

pip install behave-modern-console-report

Or install from source:

git clone https://github.com/MathiasPaulenko/behave-modern-console-report.git
cd behave-modern-console-report
pip install -e .

For development:

pip install -e ".[dev]"

Quick start

1. Create or update behave.ini in your Behave project root:

[behave]
default_format=modern-console

[behave.formatters]
modern-console = behave_modern_console_report.formatters.modern:ModernFormatter
modern-console-live = behave_modern_console_report.formatters.modern_live:ModernLiveFormatter
progress = behave_modern_console_report.formatters.progress:ProgressFormatter
log = behave_modern_console_report.formatters.log:LogFormatter
ci = behave_modern_console_report.formatters.ci:CIFormatter
minimal = behave_modern_console_report.formatters.minimal:MinimalFormatter

1. Run Behave:

behave

You can also select a formatter from the command line:

behave --format=modern-console-live

Or use the full module path without registering:

behave -f behave_modern_console_report.formatters.modern:ModernFormatter

Configuration

All options are passed through Behave's userdata mechanism. Add a [behave.userdata] section to behave.ini:

[behave.userdata]
mcr.colors = true
mcr.show_steps = true
mcr.show_traceback = true

Each formatter reads its own mcr.<formatter>.<key> namespace with fallback to global mcr.<key> keys. <formatter> is the registered formatter name: modern-console, modern-console-live, progress, log, ci, or minimal. The show_progress option is formatter-specific (no global fallback).

Override from the command line:

behave --format=modern-console -D mcr.colors=false -D mcr.show_steps=false

See docs/configuration.md for the full reference.

Example output

🚀 Behave Modern Console Report
Running scenarios...


Feature: Authentication

  ✓ Login  (602ms)
  ✗ Locked account shows error  (604ms)
  ⏭ Login with social provider

RESULTS

  Passed   18
  Failed   1
  Skipped  1

  ⏱ Duration 9.1s

CI/CD

The ci formatter is designed for CI pipelines — compact, colored status tags, and a final failure summary.

behave --format=ci -D mcr.colors=false

GitHub Actions

name: Tests
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: "3.12"
      - run: pip install -e ".[dev]"
      - run: behave --format=ci -D mcr.colors=false

Combining with the Markdown report

Show console output and generate a Markdown report at the same time:

behave -f ci -o /dev/null -f behave_modern_md_report.formatter:BehaveMarkdownFormatter -o report.md

On Windows use NUL instead of /dev/null. You can also send the console report to a file with -o report.txt — files are written in UTF-8 without ANSI codes.

See docs/ci-cd.md for GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins examples.

Architecture

Behave → BaseFormatter → Collector → Models → Render → Console

See docs/architecture.md for details.

Documentation

• docs/configuration.md — all mcr.* options and per-formatter overrides.
• docs/usage.md — usage examples and combining formatters.
• docs/ci-cd.md — GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, and Jenkins examples.
• docs/architecture.md — layered architecture and data flow.
• CONTRIBUTING.md — development setup, code style, and submitting changes.

The docs are also available as an MkDocs site. To build or serve them locally:

pip install -e ".[docs]"
mkdocs serve

Development

pytest
ruff check .
mypy behave_modern_console_report

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.

License

MIT