---
title: Quarantine
description: Ignore problematic tests in your CI
---

The quarantine feature lets you isolate broken or flaky tests in your CI pipeline without removing them entirely.
Once a test is quarantined, it will still run in your CI, but its failure
will be ignored for the purposes of blocking merges or marking a pipeline as failed.

This helps you keep your CI green while maintaining full visibility into test reliability and ongoing issues.

## How Quarantine Works

When you quarantine a test in the Mergify dashboard, its future executions will continue to be collected by
[Test Insights](/test-insights), but your CI will ignore failures.

This avoids pipeline disruption while still surfacing issues in the UI and keeping historical data intact.

Quarantined tests must still be uploaded appropriately using one of the supported CI integrations.
To ensure the correct setup, refer to [the documentation for your test framework](/test-insights#test-framework-configuration).

## When Mergify Quarantines a Test Itself

Mergify can also quarantine a test on its own, from the health status
[Detection](/test-insights/detection) assigns it. You enable this
[auto-quarantine](/test-insights/mitigation#auto-quarantine) per repository from
the Mitigation page. It does not act on that status as soon as a test looks
unhealthy: it waits until there is enough evidence behind the verdict.

Three things have to hold. The test needs a reasonable number of recent
executions to judge, it has to have been running long enough to have a pattern
at all (a test whose whole history fits inside the last few minutes reads as one
bad CI event rather than a flaky test), and a meaningful share of its runs has to
have failed. That last floor is why a single failure among thousands of green runs
never quarantines anything, however reproducible the rest of the pattern looks.

A test that has not run for a while keeps whatever health status it last had,
but Mergify stops spending [reruns](/test-insights/detection#rerunning-unhealthy-tests)
on it, since no recent run backs that verdict any more.

Until a test clears those bars, its status still shows on the dashboard and you
can quarantine it yourself; Mergify will not do it for you.

## Adding and removing tests from quarantine

### From the Mergify Dashboard

The [Mitigation page](https://dashboard.mergify.com/test-insights/mitigation) on the dashboard contains the list of
tests that Test Insights collected from your CI runs.
From there, you can add or remove a test from quarantine.

### From the Mergify CLI

The [Mergify CLI](/cli/tests) can manage quarantines from the terminal,
which is handy for scripting or for letting an AI coding agent quarantine a flaky test it just hit:

```bash
# Quarantine a test.
mergify tests quarantines add -r owner/repo \
  --reason "flaky under load, fix in progress" \
  "tests/auth/test_login.py::test_login_timeout"

# Remove it from quarantine.
mergify tests quarantines remove -r owner/repo \
  "tests/auth/test_login.py::test_login_timeout"

# List everything currently quarantined.
mergify tests quarantines list -r owner/repo
```

See the [`tests` CLI reference](/cli/tests) for all flags and exit codes.

## Staying Notified

Quarantine and dequarantine actions, whether you make them yourself or Mergify
applies them automatically, are recorded as events you can review on the
dashboard and act on. You can also have Mergify post them to a Slack channel as
they happen: see [Test Insights notifications](/integrations/slack#test-insights-notifications)
to set one up.