chromatic

What is chromatic?

The npm package 'chromatic' is a tool designed to help developers automate visual testing for their UI components. It captures snapshots of components and runs visual regression tests to ensure that changes do not break the visual appearance of applications. Chromatic integrates with Storybook to manage component libraries and streamline the testing process.

What are chromatic's main functionalities?

Visual Testing

This code sample demonstrates how to add a visual test for a simple button component using Chromatic with Storybook. The 'withChromatic' decorator is used to enable Chromatic's snapshot capabilities for the component.

import { storiesOf } from '@storybook/react';
import { withChromatic } from 'chromatic/isolated';

storiesOf('Button', module)
  .addDecorator(withChromatic)
  .add('default', () => <button>Click me</button>);

Snapshot Management

This code configures Chromatic to take snapshots after a delay and at specified screen widths, facilitating responsive visual testing. It helps in managing how snapshots are captured based on different device widths.

import { configure } from '@storybook/react';
import { setChromaticOptions } from 'chromatic';

setChromaticOptions({
  delay: 300, // Delay in ms before taking a snapshot
  widths: [320, 1200] // Array of widths for responsive testing
});

configure(() => require('./stories'), module);

Other packages similar to chromatic

storybook

Storybook is a user interface development environment and playground for UI components. It facilitates building UI components in isolation and structuring a component library. While it does not offer visual regression testing by itself, it is often used in conjunction with Chromatic to provide that functionality.

percy

Percy by BrowserStack is a visual testing and review platform that integrates with your CI/CD pipeline. It captures screenshots of web pages and components, compares them against the baseline, and highlights visual changes. Percy offers a more comprehensive CI/CD integration compared to Chromatic, which is more tightly coupled with Storybook.

backstopjs

BackstopJS automates visual regression testing of web applications by comparing DOM screenshots over time. It is a standalone tool that can be used without Storybook, providing a different approach to visual testing compared to Chromatic's dependency on Storybook for component management.

README

Chromatic CLI

Publishes your Storybook to Chromatic and kicks off tests if they're enabled.

Documentation

👉 Read the Chromatic CLI docs

📝 View the Changelog

System requirements

The Chromatic CLI (and GitHub Action) is built to run in a variety of environments. We provide support for the following platforms:

• Latest (LTS) versions of Ubuntu, Windows (Server), macOS
• Node.js Current, Active or Maintenance (LTS) versions, according to their release schedule
• Storybook 6.5+

Other platforms/versions may work, but are not officially supported. Certain features may not be available on certain platforms/versions, even if otherwise supported.

Contributing

Contributions of any kind are welcome! If you're a maintainer, refer to the following instructions to set up your development environment with Chromatic.

Compatibility & versioning

Compatibility is guaranteed between this package and Chromatic like so:

• Production Chromatic ensures it’s compatible with what’s on npm
• What's on the Git tag is equal to what's published on npm for that version
• This package ensures it’s compatible with production Chromatic

To facilitate upgrading in the future, removing and adding features, this is the process:

• Any new features will have to be on Chromatic production before they could be used in this package
• We can add feature flags to be able to test new functionality
• Chromatic production can not remove any features this package depends on until after the usage has been removed from this package in addition to a grace period to allow users to upgrade

Changelog

v11.18.0 (Thu Nov 07 2024)

🚀 Enhancement

• Detect context.projectMetadata.hasRouter and send to the index #1112 (@tmeasday)

🐛 Bug Fix

• :book: Add new issue template that references Chromatic support. #1119 (@jwir3)

Authors: 2

• Scott Johnson (@jwir3)
• Tom Coleman (@tmeasday)

---