Scriptless Testing

You don't need E2E tests to run visual tests. Give Buddy a list of URLs - or a whole sitemap - and it visits the pages and takes the snapshots for you. Every run creates a session in the suite, compared against the approved baseline like any other.

There are two ways to run scriptless tests: the Visual Tests pipeline action and the bdy CLI.

Via the Visual Tests action

In a pipeline, add the Visual Tests action, select the suite, and choose the URL source:

• Inline URL - a single address
• Inline URL list - multiple addresses
• Remote sitemap - e.g. https://example.com/sitemap.xml, with an optional ignore regex
• URL list from file - a file from the pipeline filesystem

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The action supports the same crawling options (follow internal links, respect robots.txt) and per-page overrides (ignored elements, cookies, request headers, delays, wait-for-selectors). By default it also adds an Approve Visual Tests Session action right after itself, pausing the pipeline until you review the changes - see Buddy Pipelines.

Via CLI

Install the bdy CLI and set your suite token as BUDDY_VT_TOKEN, then use bdy tests capture:

bash
# Capture an explicit list of URLs
bdy tests capture --urls "https://example.com,https://example.com/about"

# Capture every page from a sitemap and follow same-origin links
bdy tests capture --sitemap https://example.com/sitemap.xml --follow

# Capture URLs listed in a file
bdy tests capture --urlsFile ./urls.txt
$$$$$$$$

Useful options:

• --follow - follow same-origin links and capture all reachable pages
• --respectRobots - honor robots.txt
• --ignoreUrls "<regex>" - skip URLs matching a regex, e.g. "https://example.com/admin/.*"
• --ignore "CSS=.ad-banner" "XPATH=//div[@id='popup']" - exclude elements from comparison
• --cookie, --header - set cookies and HTTP headers for the visited pages (see Authentication & Network)
• --delay <ms>, --waitFor "CSS=#content" - control when the screenshot is taken (see Lazy loading)
• --dryRun - print the resolved URL list without sending anything to Buddy

Next steps

For an end-to-end walkthrough - picking the entry point, capturing the first baseline from a sitemap, and reviewing the initial diffs - see the guide Scriptless Visual Regression Testing Without Writing Code.