CI/CD Integration — Overview

Available in: QANode Enterprise

QANode's CI/CD integration allows your company to trigger scenarios and suites from the pipeline, authenticate with integration tokens, and download the consolidated execution report without relying on a browser user session.

Instead of treating QANode as only a visual interface, your company can use it as an official part of build validation, pull request checks, release gates, or deployment pipelines.

What the integration provides

• Integration tokens for pipeline and automation authentication
• Official CLI (@qanode/cli) for GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps, GitLab, Jenkins, and local scripts
• Dedicated /api/ci routes for scenarios, suites, run lookup, and report download
• Execution by ID or by name with project support when needed
• Per-execution overrides for variables and credentials
• Pipeline-friendly output with success, failed, or cancelled
• Consolidated PDF report to attach to the CI job

High-level flow

The most common operational flow is:

1. The team creates an integration token in Settings → Access Tokens
2. The pipeline stores that token as a secret
3. The job runs the QANode CLI with QANODE_URL and QANODE_TOKEN
4. QANode creates a real execution in the instance
5. The pipeline waits for the final result and decides whether to continue or fail
6. Optionally, the job downloads the consolidated PDF report

Main concepts

Public QANode URL

QANODE_URL should point to the public URL your team already uses to open QANode in the browser.

In most corporate environments this means:

• the same public frontend domain
• with a proxy or load balancer forwarding /api to the QANode API

Examples:

https://qanode.company.com
https://qa.company.com/qanode

In local development, http://localhost:3000 may also work when the frontend proxies /api.

Integration token

This is a token created specifically for automation. It replaces human login in the pipeline and respects the permissions of the user or role associated with it.

Scenario

It is an individual QANode automation made of the flow steps that validate a specific application behavior. In CI/CD, you can run a single scenario when you want to validate a critical path without executing the full suite.

Suite

A suite groups multiple scenarios and is the most common resource for full regression, smoke tests, and release gates.

Per-execution override

Overrides let you change variable values or credential fields only for that pipeline execution, without overwriting the persisted value in QANode.

Required permissions

The main CI/CD permissions are:

Token permissions are configured in Settings → Roles.

What the integration does not do automatically

Some behaviors are important to understand up front:

• the CLI does not discover the token by itself; it must be provided by the pipeline
• the CLI does not need a browser session
• the execution triggered by the pipeline is a real QANode run
• variable and credential overrides do not permanently change stored values
• the pipeline should reuse the same run ID when downloading the report instead of starting a second execution

Section navigation

Next Steps

• Integration Tokens — Learn how to generate, revoke, and govern the keys used by the pipeline