We were struggling for a bit yesterday trying to figure out why the few puts statements in our tests weren’t being displayed in Jenkins’ console output.

It turns out the ci_reporter gem that we were using (so that Jenkins could parse our test results) swallows stdout and stderr by default — unless you set the CI_CAPTURE environment variable to the string "off", like it tells you to do in the readme.

That was a confusing default setting. Since my pair and I weren’t involved in setting up Jenkins, and we didn’t install the ci_reporter gem, we assumed something was misconfigured in Jenkins before we started digging through the code.

Hopefully this saves someone else some time!