Unhelpful startup error when nothing is passed to `--reporter` flag

Open Beginner friendly

#11,019 opened on Aug 20, 2026 5 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

Nobody has claimed this yet.

Assessment

Difficulty: 2/5
Estimated time: 1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness: 72/100

Issue type: Bug
Clarity: Mostly clear
Activity status: Active
Tech stack: typescript
Domain: cli

Research direction

Start by running vitest --reporter and tracing how the CLI parses the --reporter option before it attempts to load a custom reporter. Locate the related option handling and reporter tests, then verify that the command reports a clear missing-name error while valid reporter names continue to work.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

pending triage

Describe the bug

Running Vitest with --reporter but without a reporter name

vitest --reporter

results in an internal-looking error:

Error: Failed to load custom Reporter from true
...
[cause]: Error: Failed to convert JavaScript value `Boolean true` into rust type `String`
...

An error message like this would be more helpful:

Error: The --reporter option requires a reporter name.
Available examples: verbose, dot, json

Reproduction

https://stackblitz.com/edit/vitest-dev-vitest-nvlgtsbv?file=README.md&file=md!README.md&initialPath=__vitest__/

System Info

System:
    OS: Linux 5.0 undefined
    CPU: (8) x64 Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-9880H CPU @ 2.30GHz
    Memory: 0 Bytes / 0 Bytes
    Shell: 1.0 - /bin/jsh
  Binaries:
    Node: 22.22.3 - /usr/local/bin/node
    Yarn: 1.22.19 - /usr/local/bin/yarn
    npm: 10.8.2 - /usr/local/bin/npm
    pnpm: 8.15.6 - /usr/local/bin/pnpm
  npmPackages:
    @vitest/ui: latest => 4.1.11 
    vite: latest => 8.2.1 
    vitest: latest => 4.1.11

Used Package Manager

npm

Validations

Follow our Code of Conduct
Read the Contributing Guidelines.
Read the docs.
Check that there isn't already an issue that reports the same bug to avoid creating a duplicate.
Check that this is a concrete bug. For Q&A open a GitHub Discussion or join our Discord Chat Server.
The provided reproduction is a minimal reproducible example of the bug.

Dominant language: TypeScript
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First steps

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