Spectre is a web application to diff screenshots. It's heavily influenced by VisualReview, BackstopJS and Wraith. Read more about how we use it at Friday in our blog post: How we do visual regression testing.
You can either run the app using docker, or you can run it natively on your machine – there are instructions for both docker, and running on macOS below.
Alternatively, you can run the application on Heroku.
Install docker
Setup the database (only needs to be done once):
docker-compose run --rm app bundle exec rake db:setup
To run the application:
docker-compose up
When you see WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=2 port=3000
, the app will be running at http://localhost:3000
- Ruby (doesn't currently work with v2.4.0)
- Postgres
- Imagemagick
On a Mac, the easiest way to install the above, is to use homebrew.
- install homebrew using these instructions
brew install rbenv
rbenv install 2.7.1
rbenv init
and follow the instructions it printsbrew install imagemagick@6
brew install postgresql
and follow the instructions it prints about starting the postgresql server
- Clone the repo
bundle install && bundle exec rake db:setup
bundle exec rails s
A "test" is a screenshot and associated metadata. A test is categorised under a Project, which in turn has (test) Suites. A test is submitted and associated with a "run" of a suite.
First you should create a new "run". The JSON response will contain the run_id
to submit with each subsequent test.
POST /runs
project: My Project Name
suite: My Suite Name
Then you can submit a screenshot!
POST /tests
test:
run_id: {run_id from above},
name: Homepage,
platform: OSX,
browser: PhantomJS,
size: 1024,
screenshot: <File>,
crop_area: '640x480+50+100'
name
is a friendly name of your test. It should describe the template, component or state of the thing you've screenshottedplatform
is the OS/platform that the screenshot was taken on (e.g. OSX, Windows, iOS, Android etc.)browser
is the browser that was used to render the screenshot. This will usually be a headless webkit such as Phantom, but if using Selenium you may have used a "real" browsersize
is the screenshot sizescreenshot
is the image itself. PNGs are preferredcrop_area
allows to specify a bounding box to crop from uploaded screenshot ("x+<top_left_x>+<top_left_y>"). If not specified, full screenshot is used for comparison. Can be used to perform visual diffs for specific page elements.
Most of the time you'll want to use your own rake task to control Selenium and take screenshots, or take screenshots during cucumber step definitions. There's a handy spectre_client gem to upload screenshots to your Spectre gem.
An example test run can be executed using:
docker-compose run --rm app bin/demo_test_run http://app:3000
or, if not using docker, first install phantomjs (brew install phantomjs
), then run:
bin/demo_test_run http://localhost:3000
If you've deployed the app on heroku, you can replace the URL with the hosted one, e.g.:
docker-compose run --rm app bin/demo_test_run https://your-spectre-install.herokuapp.com
# or
bin/demo_test_run https://your-spectre-install.herokuapp.com
Spectre doesn't provide a UI or API to edit or delete content. We've included rails_admin
, so head to /admin
for this. By default there is no password.
Rspec and Cucumber are included in the project.
Test coverage is minimal but please don't follow our lead, write tests for anything you add. Use rake
to run the existing tests.