Offline export

NeedsReporter

An investigation is only useful while someone can open it. Piwi can write a failing execution or a whole failure cluster to a file that opens with no network and no Piwi server — for a ticket attachment, a mail to someone without an account, or an archive that outlives your retention window.

The Export button sits on a test-case execution (/test-run-cases/:id) and on a failure cluster (/failure-clusters/:id). A run (/test-runs/:id) and an execution also offer a Perfetto trace (see below).

Formats

Format	What you get
HTML	One file. Screenshots and video are embedded as `data:` URIs; error, steps, console, network, ARIA snapshot, test source and the AI diagnosis are all inline. Double-click it.
ZIP	`report.html` plus the raw artifacts on disk — full-size video, reconstructed `trace.zip` archives, console and network logs — and `data.json` with everything the report shows, machine-readable.
PDF	The HTML report opened with your browser's print dialog. Video and traces cannot survive printing; everything else does.
Markdown / JSON	Text only, for pasting into an issue or feeding an agent.

A cluster export carries the most recent failing execution of each affected test.

What an export leaves out, and why it tells you

Exports are bounded so one download cannot exhaust the server:

Variable	Default	Bounds
`PIWI_EXPORT_MAX_INLINE_BYTES`	8 MB	What a single HTML file will embed as a `data:` URI. Larger files stay out of the one-file HTML; the ZIP still carries them at full size.
`PIWI_EXPORT_MAX_BYTES`	500 MB	The whole export. Evidence is added largest-last until the budget is reached. The archive is built in memory, so this also bounds what one export costs the server.
`PIWI_EXPORT_MAX_CASES`	25	Member executions carrying full evidence in a cluster export. Remaining affected tests are listed by name.

Anything left out is listed in an Omitted from this export table in the report and in the ZIP's README.txt — an export never drops evidence silently. Defaults and tuning: Configuration.

Opening a hostile report safely

The exported HTML carries a restrictive Content-Security-Policy and escapes every value that came from a test run, so a report is safe to open even when the failure it describes involved hostile page content.

Reading an exported trace

The ZIP carries reconstructed trace.zip archives, but reading one still needs a Playwright trace viewer — npx playwright show-trace trace.zip, or the bundled viewer on any Piwi instance. Bundling the viewer's assets into the export itself is on the roadmap.

Perfetto trace

A run and an execution also export as a Perfetto trace — a Trace Event Format JSON file that opens the run on a timeline in ui.perfetto.dev or Chrome's chrome://tracing, with no Piwi server needed.

The file lays the run out the way it ran: one process per shard, one thread per worker. Each execution is a slice on its worker's thread, with its hooks, fixtures and steps nested underneath by start time, and a slice colored by outcome (green passed, red failed). A failing execution adds an instant marker at the moment it failed. Every slice carries its details in the event arguments — source location, step params, tags, locks, annotations, status, error message, and links back to the execution and its attachments on the dashboard. Suite-level beforeAll/afterAll setup steps appear on their worker's thread too.

Open it by dragging the downloaded .json onto ui.perfetto.dev, or use Open trace file there. Timestamps are relative to the first event, so a run always starts at zero.

The trace does not embed the attachments themselves — screenshots, video and trace archives are referenced by their dashboard URL, so following those links needs the Piwi instance the run came from. For a self-contained snapshot of one failure, use the HTML or ZIP export above.

Offline export ​

Formats ​

What an export leaves out, and why it tells you ​

Opening a hostile report safely ​

Reading an exported trace ​

Perfetto trace ​

See also ​