Getting started with visual testing in 5 minutes

Introduction

There are tons of tools out there that help you make sure your app is functioning perfectly, but how do you catch bugs that are purely visual?

In the example above, the button still works, and the text is actually still there, but the link somehow changed to be the same color as the button.

You could write regression tests to ensure that the text is always white, and the button is always green, but across hundreds of pages and states, that becomes unruly very fast. So in lieu of (or in addition to) writing line after line of regression tests, you might manually check all those pages before deploying. But we all know how time-consuming and imperfect manual QA can be.

That’s where visual testing comes in.

Visual testing is a new way to have confidence in your UI. Instead of manually checking your UI or testing the code underneath, visual testing detects pixel-by-pixel changes on every commit automatically. Visual testing can save you time reviewing code and ensuring no visual bugs make their way to production.

In this tutorial, we’ll walk through integrating the Percy visual testing service with an example app, reviewing visual changes, and running visual reviews as part of your day-to-day workflow.

Step 1 — Integrating Percy

If you haven’t already, sign up for a Percy account, name your organization, and create your first project.

Note: Signing up for a Percy account will kick off a 14-day trial, but once that expires, you’ll be transferred to a free plan that includes 5,000 free snapshots each month.

Percy projects correspond with the apps, sites, or component libraries you want to test. The Percy SDKs can add visual testing to most anything that renders in a browser.

Some popular examples are:

• Cypress.io
• Puppeteer
• Storybook for React
• Ember web apps
• Capybara for Ruby apps

The SDKs work by importing and calling Percy snapshot commands wherever you’d like visual coverage.

For this tutorial, we’ll use PercyScript, which provides a quick and easy way to start doing visual testing in just a couple of lines of JavaScript. PercyScript can fully interact with elements by clicking, typing, and waiting, and can also be used to test live URLs. Read more in the official PercyScript documentation.

For this tutorial, we’re going to use a TodoMVC example app. You can adapt the PercyScript below to work for your own application.

First, let’s set up the example app. This will require Node.js and npm to be installed. For more information about installing Node, please see How To Install Node.js on Ubuntu 18.04:

git clone https://github.com/percy/example-todomvc.git
cd example-todomvc/
npm install
npm run start

You can now visit http://localhost:8000 and play around with the todos app yourself.

Next, we’re going to install PercyScript and write our first visual tests for this application.

Keep the server running, open a new terminal, and run:

npm install -D @percy/script

This will add @percy/script to your package.json file.

Next, create a file named snapshots.js and add your first PercyScript:

// snapshots.js
const PercyScript = require('@percy/script');

// A script to navigate our app and take snapshots with Percy.
PercyScript.run(async (page, percySnapshot) => {
  await page.goto('http://localhost:8000');
  await percySnapshot('TodoMVC home page');

  // Enter a new to-do.
  await page.type('.new-todo', 'A really important todo');
  await page.keyboard.press('Enter');
  await percySnapshot('TodoMVC with a new todo', { widths: [768, 992, 1200] });
});

The next step is to start running this PercyScript and seeing visual changes.

Step 2 — Running Visual Tests

To run your PercyScript locally, copy PERCY_TOKEN from the new project screen, then run:

export PERCY_TOKEN=your_token_here
npx percy exec -- node snapshots.js

You should see output like:

Output
[percy] created build #1: https://percy.io/test/example-todomvc/builds/1738842
[percy] percy has started.
[percy] snapshot taken: 'TodoMVC home page'
[percy] snapshot taken: 'TodoMVC with a new todo'
[percy] stopping percy...
[percy] waiting for 2 snapshots to complete...
[percy] done.
[percy] finalized build #1: https://percy.io/test/example-todomvc/builds/1738842

The PercyScript has run, sending snapshots up to Percy for rendering and processing:

You’ll see that since this is the first build, there isn’t anything to compare it to. It has also been “Auto-Approved” because the commit was on master and Percy assumes that master builds are production-ready.

Percy works by capturing the DOM snapshot everywhere the Percy snapshot command is called. The page or component is then rendered in a custom rendering environment. New snapshots are compared against baseline snapshots to determine which pixels have changed.

Now that you’ve integrated your project and have pushed your first build to establish your baseline, let’s make a change and review the differences.

Step 3 — Reviewing Visual Changes

Let’s make a new feature branch and introduce a visual change.

Use your text editor to edit index.html and make the h1 text on line 11 purple:

<h1 style="color:#9e66bf;">

Now run the snapshots again:

npx percy exec -- node snapshots.js

Open up the resulting link, and you can now see the visual changes highlighted.

Side-by-side Comparison

The red areas in the right panel represent pixels that have changed — those changed pixels are called visual diffs.

Clicking that area (or pressing d) will toggle between the underlying snapshot and the overlaid diff so you can see what exactly has changed.

Responsive Diffs

You’ll notice the widths at which your snapshots have been rendered show up here. In this example we rendered snapshots for mobile and desktop widths.

Select the various widths to see what has changed across each width.

Cross-browser Visual Testing

By default, Percy renders all snapshots with both Chrome and Firefox.

Cross-browser snapshots help you detect subtle differences caused by browser rendering.

If you’re happy with your changes, hit Approve All. You’ve completed your first visual review.

Step 4 — Integrating Visual Testing with Code Workflows

To get the most value out of automated visual testing, it may make sense to add visual reviews to you continuous integration and testing workflows.

To configure Percy with your CI service so that visual tests runs every time a CI build is kicked off, you need to add your PERCY_TOKEN to your CI environment variables. For more in-depth instructions and to see all of our supported CI services, check out the official Percy CI setup documentation.

You can also add Percy to your pull/merge requests to be notified when visual changes are detected, and when those changes are approved and ready to merge.

Head to your organization settings to give Percy access to GitHub or GitLab. Once you’ve given access, connect your project on Percy to your project’s source repository. Then the next time you commit, Percy will show up in your pull/merge request checks:

Clicking Details will take you right to the Percy UI where you can review visual changes. After snapshots are approved, your commit status will change to green and the PR can be merged:

At this point you’re ready to merge.

Conclusion

In this tutorial we have reviewed a visual testing workflow using Percy’s visual review platform. To continue learning about how Percy works, take a look at some more of the official documentation:

• Getting started with Percy
• Percy platform basics
• Visual testing basics
• Percy SDKs