README.md

🎨 Visual Differ

A Node-based auditing tool to visually diff pages

🤔 What is it?

Have you ever made a change that negatively impacted the front-end? Checking one page for a change might be easy. Checking hundreds is difficult and time-consuming.

Visual Differ allows you to supply an array of URLs to audit and will create an audit.csv to show which comparisons passed and which ones had a non-trivial difference as defined in your config file.

Additionally, you can review the screenshots that were taken and see a "heatmap" of the visual differences thanks to the pixelmatch library.

✅ Usage

1. Download the project
2. Install dependencies npm i
3. Copy config.example.js to config.js
4. Modify your config.js values and supply your array of URLs to test
5. Run node index.js to create screenshots, diffs and generate an audit.csv file

⚙️ Configuring your Test

You can easily modify the parameters of your test in the config.js file (after copying config.example.js to config.js). Below are all of the options you can modify.

module.exports = {
  // The viewport to use when creating images from the URLs
  viewport: {
    width: 1280,
    height: 800,
  },

  // Matching threshold, ranges from 0 to 1. Smaller values make the comparison more sensitive. 0.1 by default.
  // See pixelmatch for more information: https://github.com/mapbox/pixelmatch#api
  diffThreshold: 0.1,

  // The number of pixels in the diff that, once reached, will be flagged in the audit during the testing
  nonacceptableDiff: 10,

  // The maximum amount of screenshot requests to run concurrently. Careful.
  maxConcurrency: 2,

  // The URLs to test for visual differences
  urls: [
    {
      // The first URL to test
      a: "https://time.is/Los_Angeles",

      // The URL to compare the first test to
      b: "https://time.is/New_York",

      // Need to pass in some custom CSS to your test so you can hide or change elements?
      // Provide as much CSS you need and it will be applied when navigating to the URLs
      css: ``,
    },
  ],
};