Comparing web pages and htmlwidgets

odiffr compares images; it does not open web pages or drive a browser. To test how a web page, an R Markdown/Quarto report or an htmlwidget looks, take a screenshot with a headless browser first, for example with webshot2 or chromote (both use Chrome or Chromium), and then compare the PNG files with odiff. For Shiny apps, see vignette("shinytest2").

Screenshot a page

webshot2::webshot(
  "https://example.com",
  file = "current/home.png",
  vwidth = 1280, vheight = 800,
  delay = 0.5           # let the page settle
)

Local HTML files work too, e.g. a rendered report: webshot2::webshot("report.html", "current/report.png").

Screenshot an htmlwidget

Save the widget as an HTML file, then take a screenshot of it:

widget <- DT::datatable(head(iris))  # any htmlwidget

html <- tempfile(fileext = ".html")
htmlwidgets::saveWidget(widget, html, selfcontained = TRUE)
webshot2::webshot(html, file = "current/table.png",
                  vwidth = 800, vheight = 600, delay = 1)

Keep everything deterministic that you can: a fixed viewport size, a fixed zoom level, a fixed seed for random data, and no animations (many widgets have an option to disable them). Map tiles and other content loaded from the internet can change at any time; avoid them in tests or hide them with ignore_regions.

Compare with a baseline

Browser screenshots contain anti-aliasing noise around rounded corners, borders and text. The "screenshot" preset ignores anti-aliased pixels while keeping the colour threshold low (see ?odiff_preset):

library(odiffr)

result <- do.call(compare_images, c(
  list("baseline/home.png", "current/home.png", diff_output = "home-diff.png"),
  odiff_preset("screenshot")
))
result$match

For many pages at once, use compare_image_dirs() and batch_report():

results <- do.call(compare_image_dirs, c(
  list("baseline/", "current/", diff_dir = "diffs/"),
  odiff_preset("screenshot")
))
batch_report(results, output_file = "report.html", images = "all",
             embed = TRUE)

As a testthat snapshot

expect_snapshot_image() stores the screenshot as a testthat snapshot and compares it with odiff on later runs. On failure a diff image is written to tests/testthat/_odiffr/.

test_that("report looks the same", {
  skip_if_not_installed("webshot2")
  path <- tempfile(fileext = ".png")
  webshot2::webshot("report.html", file = path,
                    vwidth = 1024, vheight = 768)

  expect_snapshot_image(
    path,
    name = "report",
    preset = "screenshot",
    variant = Sys.info()[["sysname"]]  # fonts differ between systems
  )
})

Review changes with testthat::snapshot_review(), and on CI write a report of all changed snapshots with snapshot_report().