Testing walkthrough

Once you have installed the Trakr GitHub app. It is very easy to set up a project to automatically test whenever there’s a pull request (PR) or additional commits on the PRs.

Before you start, make sure you have the App installed, under the integration tab of your Trakr user account it should look similar to below:

Pre-requisite

GitHub step 1

(Tip: make sure you also authorized the repositories that you wish to use as part of the project)

Creating the project

When you create a new project, you should now be prompted with options on how you want to create the project.

Create project

You should now be able to select a list of repositories you have authorized the app to run on.

GitHub step 3

Once you have selected the repository that corresponds to the project, it will take you to the rest of the onboarding process.

GitHub step 4

On the onboarding process, it is important to select the right base branch for your deployment (typically this is the branch that you create pull request against or to merge into).  Note that the base URL of your website or web app should correspond to the base branch you have selected on this screen.

GitHub step 5

You should now have the project setup. You do not have to go back and re-configure the project unless the deployment detail of your project has changed.

Running the tests

GitHub step 1

On Github, my corresponding repository has 2 branches: master and 8×14-update. In this particular case, we use the master branch as our base branch that deploys to our production website/web-app. In practice, this can be any branch you use as your “live/production” deployment.

We also have another branch (8×14-update), this is our “feature branch” that we are looking to compare against the base branch (master) and merge it in order to deploy an update to our website/web-app.

GitHub step 2

Here we are simply creating a pull request (PR) against the master branch. This will trigger Trakr’s testing.

GitHub step 3

As soon as you create the PR, you will see a couple of items appearing under the “checks” section. The app does 2 things:

  1. It creates a snapshot of your baseline environment that corresponds to the “master” branch
  2. It prompts you to provide a “build environment” where it can use to perform the visual test.

(Trakr requires that you have “build environment” generated from your feature branch that can be publically accessed)

GitHub step 5

If you click on the “details” of the visual comparison test, you can click on the link to “Provide a Build Environment” which will take you to a screen similar to below:

GitHub step 6

Here you can provide the build environment URL associated with your feature branch. It should be publically accessible. Once you have provided this information, you will be taken back to the pull request with the visual comparison test marked as “complete”

GitHub step 7
(Please note this doesn’t mean it passed the visual comparison test)

GitHub step 9

Finally, after reviewing the test, you can mark this as passed or failed.