Console tool to generate visual regression tests between two environments. It is a simple wrapper for the awesome backstop tool.

Requirements

1. Docker
2. PHP 7.2

Installation

1. git clone git@github.com:arturolinares/easy-vrt.git: Get the code.
2. composer install: Install this project dependencies.
3. bin/console vrt:init: Prepares backstop.

Commmands

bin/console  vrt:init    Prepares backstop worspace on directory "var/backstop/backstop_data".
bin/console  vrt:gen     Generates a backstop config file from a CSV with the routes to test.
bin/console  vrt:run     Runs backstop and builds the html report.
bin/console  vrt:server  Starts a server to browse the results.

Usage

Once the project is installed you will want to compare two sites. Follow these steps:

1. Generate the backstop scenarios using a CSV file containing the routes to visit.
2. Run the tests.
3. Browse the results to visualize the differences.

To generate the scenarios use the commmand vrt:gen. It will use a CSV file with the routes to generate them:

bin/console vrt:gen path/to/routes.csv --ref-domain=http://prod.com --url=http://my-qa.com

You can find a sample of the CSV file in the sample directory. The file has two fields: the route and an optional label. For example:

/,"The Homepage"
/category/tag,
"/about-us", "About US"

You can set the reference domain using the flag --ref-domain. This is normally production. Use the flag --url to specify the domain you want to compare.

Sometimes you need to create several scenarios for the same route but different prefix. For example, when using multilingual sites. To specify the prefixes you can use the --prefix (-p) option:

bin/console vrt:gen path/to/routes.csv -u http://my-qa.com -p es -p en -p fr

The above will generate scenarios for these urls:

/es/
/en/
/fr/
/es/category/tag
/en/category/tag
/fr/category/tag
/es/about-us
/en/about-us
/fr/about-us

Until now you only have configured backstop. To actually run the tests use vrt:run. This commmand will run backstop using a Docker container. Also, if you want to see what the script is doing, you can change the verbosity with -v, -vv and -vvv.

Finally, to see the report, use vrt:server to browse the diffs.

Motivation

I normally work on different and very active projects with several testing environments. I needed a simple and fast way to generate visual regression tests between them, or even to just to compare my local environment to an integration server. I find cumbersome to edit backstop configuration files frequently just to change servers.

Also, I wanted to test Symfony console libraries :)