startRecording

Start recording the screen for video documentation of test runs.

The startRecording command begins a screen recording of the test Flow. Use this command to collect visual evidence of your test runs, especially when debugging complex UI transitions or intermittently failing tests. The resulting video file is saved in .mp4 format.

Important considerations

• You must use the stopRecording command to finalize the video file.
• The behavior and file location of recordings may differ slightly when running tests via Maestro Studio compared to the CLI.

Parameters

To use the startRecording, you can provide only the file name to be saved, or you can use all the following parameters:

Parameter	Type	Description
path	string	The filename for the recording, without the extension. May include subdirectories. See Artifact paths for info about where it's saved.
label	string	(Optional) A descriptive label for the command step that appears in the test report.
optional	boolean	(Optional) If true, the command does not fail the test if it cannot be executed. Defaults to false.

Usage examples

Basic usage

This example uses the shorthand syntax to start a recording that will be saved as recording.mp4.

appId: yourAppId
---
- launchApp
- startRecording: recording
- stopRecording

You need to use the stopRecording command to instruct Maestro to stop recording the device screen.

Custom path and labels

This example uses the expanded syntax to specify a directory, a descriptive label for the reports, and marks the command as optional to ensure the test continues even if the video engine fails to start.

- startRecording:
    path: "recordings/user_onboarding"
    label: "Capture onboarding sequence for evidence"
    optional: true

Artifact paths

Maestro writes this command's output into the startRecording folder of the Flow's artifact bundle. See Layout of a Flow's artifact folder.

The path must name a file, and must not attempt to escape the artifacts folder. Maestro rejects the command with an Invalid path error (and will fail the flow) if the value:

• names a directory rather than a file
• climbs out of the command's output folder using .., such as ../escape
• is an empty string, which happens when a variable in the path resolves to ""

An absolute path is allowed as long as it still points at the correct directory. This might be used, for example, via maestro test --test-output-dir=/tmp/maestro123 --env OUTPUTDIR=/tmp/maestro123 ... to compute paths that work for the environment at runtime.

A variable that was never defined does not fail the command. It resolves to undefined, and the recording is silently written to undefined.mp4.

If the file cannot be written (e.g. full disk or read-only destination), the Flow fails with Cannot write startRecording output to ....

Related commands

• stopRecording