Understanding results · Privateer Docs

Where output files land, how to control the format, and how to suppress terminal output.

After a run, Privateer writes output to <write-directory>/<service-name>/. By default this is evaluation_results/<service-name>/.

evaluation_results/
  my-github-repo/
    my-github-repo.log     # Full execution log for this service
    my-github-repo.yaml    # Structured validation results

Two files are written for every service, both named after the service. The .log file captures everything Privateer and the plugin did during the run, it is recommended to check this file first when something goes wrong. The results file contains the control-by-control outcome of the validation. Its extension matches your configured output format (.yaml, .json, or .sarif).

Controlling the output format

The format of the results file is set in your config:

output: yaml    # yaml (default) | json | sarif

Setting output: json or output: sarif produces <service-name>.json or <service-name>.sarif in place of the default <service-name>.yaml. SARIF output is compatible with the GitHub Security tab, see SARIF upload for the GitHub Security tab for how to upload it.

Config settings that affect output:

Setting	Default	Description
`write-directory`	`evaluation_results`	Where result files are written
`write`	`true`	Whether to write output files at all
`output`	`yaml`	Output format: `yaml`, `json`, or `sarif`
`loglevel`	`error`	Log verbosity: `trace`, `debug`, `info`, `warn`, `error`, `off`

Suppressing terminal output

To suppress all non-essential log output to the terminal without changing your log level setting, use the --silent flag at runtime:

pvtr run -c config.yml --silent

This is useful in CI environments where you want clean pipeline output but still want full results written to disk.

If no output files appear after a run, check the following:

# Confirm these are set in your config
write: true                          # Must not be set to false
write-directory: evaluation_results  # Must be a path you have write access to

Then re-run with debug logging to see what went wrong:

pvtr run -c config.yml --loglevel debug