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The Test Cabinet The Test Cabinet

Run a Test Case

Launch a single test case through an agent harness and watch it to completion. This quickstart uses the CLI, the most direct path for scripting and batch sweeps. You can also launch and watch runs interactively in the Tauri desktop app or the web console. All three enqueue the run at the backend, which executes it server-side as a per-run driver Job. For the full walkthrough, prerequisites, and platform notes see First Time Setup.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”

A working setup: a reachable backend (TCAB_BACKEND_URL) whose run queue an in-cluster dispatcher is draining — for local development, the k3d service stack brought up and forwarded — plus a logged-in account (tcab login). tcab needs no container runtime of its own; the cluster supplies the harness credentials to the run. See First Time Setup if any of those are missing.

Run it

Section titled “Run it”
Terminal window
tcab run \
  --test-case carom --version v1.0.0 --variant base \
  --harness claude --model claude-opus-4-8

From a source checkout, substitute cargo run -p test-cabinet-cli -- run … for tcab run ….

  • --variant is required: a run targets exactly one variant.
  • --model is passed to the harness unchanged; it is opaque to The Test Cabinet.
  • --max-runtime <hours> overrides the case’s max_runtime_hours for this invocation only (fractional hours allowed, for example 0.5).
  • --out-dir runs is optional: it writes the fetched run record JSON locally (otherwise nothing is written — the backend holds the artifacts).

tcab run enqueues the run on the backend’s queue, prints the queued job id, streams the live event stream as the driver executes it (seeding a fresh repository, driving the harness in a sandbox pod, then validating), and reads the produced run record back to print its summary.

Inspect inputs without a run

Section titled “Inspect inputs without a run”
Terminal window
tcab prompt --test-case carom --version v1.0.0 --variant base   # the rendered prompt
tcab seed   --test-case carom --version v1.0.0 --variant base   # the seeded repo, on disk
tcab harnesses                                                 # harness availability

See the CLI overview for every subcommand.

Next steps

Section titled “Next steps”