Reporters

The validator writes results to stdout by default. Use --reporter to control the format, --groupby to organize results, and --quiet to suppress output entirely.

Reporter types

Reporter	Description	Use case
standard	Human-readable table (default)	Terminal use, local development
json	Structured JSON	CI pipelines, scripting, programmatic consumption
junit	JUnit XML	Jenkins, GitLab CI, any system that reads JUnit reports
sarif	SARIF 2.1.0	GitHub Code Scanning, VS Code SARIF Viewer
github	GitHub workflow annotations	GitHub Actions logs

Basic usage

validator --reporter=json .

Output to a file

Append :<path> to the reporter name to write results to a file:

validator --reporter=json:output.json .

Repeat the same reporter type with different paths to write the same format to more than one file:

validator --reporter=json:summary.json --reporter=json:artifacts/summary.json .

Use :- to explicitly direct output to stdout (useful when combining reporters):

validator --reporter=json:- --reporter=junit:results.xml .

Multiple reporters

Chain --reporter flags to produce multiple outputs in a single run:

validator --reporter=standard --reporter=json:output.json .

validator --reporter=junit:results.xml --reporter=sarif:results.sarif .

In .cfv.toml:

reporter = ["standard", "json:output.json"]

Grouping output

note

Grouping only applies to the standard and json reporters.

Use --groupby to organize the report. Supported groupings:

Value	Groups by
filetype	File format (JSON, YAML, TOML, etc.)
directory	Parent directory
pass-fail	Validation result
error-type	Type of error (syntax, schema)

Combine multiple groupings:

validator --groupby=filetype,pass-fail .

In .cfv.toml:

groupby = ["filetype", "pass-fail"]

Reporters

JSON

The JSON reporter produces an array of result objects:

[
  {
    "file": "/path/to/config.yaml",
    "status": "pass",
    "message": ""
  },
  {
    "file": "/path/to/broken.json",
    "status": "fail",
    "message": "unexpected EOF"
  }
]

SARIF

The SARIF reporter produces a SARIF 2.1.0 log. This integrates with:

• GitHub Code Scanning — upload with github/codeql-action/upload-sarif
• VS Code — view with the SARIF Viewer extension
• Azure DevOps — native SARIF support in pipeline results

You can merge SARIF output from other tools into the same report. The validator's results remain the first run, and each external SARIF run is appended without rewriting the tool metadata, rules, or results.

validator --reporter=sarif:results.sarif --merge-sarif=gitleaks.sarif --merge-sarif=trivy.sarif .

To merge every SARIF file in a directory tree:

validator --reporter=sarif:results.sarif --merge-sarif-dir=reports .

Example GitHub Actions step:

- name: Upload SARIF
  uses: github/codeql-action/upload-sarif@v3
  with:
    sarif_file: results.sarif
  if: always()

JUnit

The JUnit reporter produces XML compatible with CI systems that consume JUnit test reports. Each validated file appears as a test case; failures include the error message.