VisualReview

VisualReview's goal is to provide a productive and human-friendly workflow for testing and reviewing your web application's layout across several browsers, resolutions and platforms.

VisualReview functions as a server which accepts screenshots of your web application, sent for example, from your selenium or protractor scripts. These shots are then compared to screenshots you uploaded and reviewed earlier. VisualReview will display and highlight any differences between the two and allows you to either accept or reject these changes.

Currently VisualReview provides a Protractor plug-in to easily upload screenshots from your protractor tests. However, the VisualReview server has a simple API which allows compatibility with other testing frameworks. We are working on other plug-ins and hope to release them soon.

WARNING: VisualReview is currently under heavy development. This means that it is not yet ready for production use. The current releases are meant as a preview for you to try out and to get some early feedback. Until then, expect bugs, instability and breaking changes which might remove stored data from earlier releases. We do however expect to release a 1.0.0 version in the future which will maintain data compatibility across versions.

Getting started

Configuring and starting the VisualReview server

First, download and extract a preview release from here.
Configure the environment variables in start.sh (optional)
Make sure that the screenshot directory exists (default is .visualreview/screenshots)
Run ./start.sh
Open your browser at http://localhost:7000 (or the port you configured in start.sh)
Create a new project

Running your first test

Send screenshots during a test to VisualReview. We currently provide a Protractor plug-in to do this. See the protractor-plugin's README for details on how to configure Protractor to send screenshots to VisualReview.

Reviewing the results

Go back to the VisualReview page on http://localhost:7000 (or the port you configured in start.sh).
Navigate to your project and suite name. Here you see all the times you ran a test script against this project and suite combination.
Click on the run to review all screenshots and differences. If this is the first time you created a run in this suite, there will be no differences yet.
To approve or reject a screenshot, use the top-right menu or hit the 'a' or 'x' key on your keyboard.
- When you accept a screenshot, it will be added to this suite's so-called 'baseline'. Every future screenshot with that name inside the suite will be compared to this baseline. All screenshots you accept in future runs will overwrite this baseline. The baseline will therefore contain all latest accepted screenshots of a suite to which all new screenshots will be compared against.
- When you reject a screenshot, the baseline will not be updated.
- After you either accepted or rejected a screenshot, you can always revert this decision by selecting the 'pending' option in the top right menu.

Features in development (aka known issues, limitations)

VisualReview is currently in heavy development and is not yet ready for production use. Here's a (not finalized) list of features we'd like to get finished before moving towards a stable 1.0.0 release.

Move from environment-variable configuration to using configuration files
Support for multiple browsers, platforms and resolutions inside one suite
Support multiple baselines per suite. Provide baseline management GUI
Add GUI for deleting projects, suites, runs
Provide screenshot cleanup functionality to save disk space.
Refine the GUI. Including better dropdown menu, image zoom tools and others
Better error handling in GUI
Support for other databases (Postgres, cassandra..?)

VisualReview Enterprise

In addition we are also working on an Enterprise edition of VisualReview. This edition will contain all the features of the open source edition and adds enterprise features such as user authentication, access from the cloud, enterprise support and more. We will release more details in the future. In the meantime, you can contact us at visualreview@xebia.com to receive updates.

Original authors and maintainers

We'd like to acknowledge the original authors of this project, from before version 0.1 and beyond:

License

Distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

simongroenewolt/VisualReview