Supporting Both Verification and Recording in a Single Gradle Task

[artur-bakiev-mx51]

Hey Paparazzi team!

I was wondering if you have plans to support both verification and recording in a single Gradle task—similar to how Roborazzi does it with ./gradlew verifyAndRecordRoborazziDebug. This would be super helpful for CI/CD integration.

Like many teams, we can’t rely on local snapshot generation due to rounding issues, so we need to use CI/CD workflows. Our typical process looks like this:

• Create a test for a new screen
• Push a PR
• If the PR fails, generate a new screenshot and create a branch with the updated image

Right now, we basically have two options:

• Run the verify task, and if it fails, run the record task and create a branch
• Run the record task first, then check for any changed screenshots and create a branch if needed

Both approaches feel a bit tedious, error-prone, and not optimal for performance. It would be awesome if you could consider adding this feature to Paparazzi.

P.S. Another suggestion: making this configurable via project properties (like Paparazzi.test.verify=true) would make CI/CD scenarios even smoother. That way, we could use the same testDebug command for both local and CI/CD runs, just tweaking it with a project property for CI/CD.

P.P.S. Running something like

./gradlew verifyPaparazziDebug recordPaparazziDebug testDebugUnitTest

(similar to what mentioned here) could work too, but it’s less obvious and requires different commands for local vs. CI/CD runs.

Thanks for considering!

[tdrhq]

There are third-party tools that can handle the storage and PR reporting of screenshots, and are usually agnostic of the screenshot testing library (including iOS). For instance, what you need isn't a separate branch with the screenshots, but just a notification on your PR with a link to all the screenshots that have changed.

[artur-bakiev-mx51]

There are third-party tools that can handle the storage and PR reporting of screenshots, and are usually agnostic of the screenshot testing library (including iOS). For instance, what you need isn't a separate branch with the screenshots, but just a notification on your PR with a link to all the screenshots that have changed.

Thanks for the suggestion, Arnold Noronha. You're essentially proposing to delegate triggering verifyPaparazziDebug and recordPaparazziDebug to a third-party tool. I'm not sure how that would address my use case—currently, our GitHub workflow triggers both commands without any external tooling.

Notifications aren't really an issue for us either, since there are plenty of GitHub actions that can post comments directly to a PR.

[tdrhq]

I'm sure your current workflow works great, was just suggesting an alternative approach. The alternative is just to run recordPaparazziDebug once, and uploading the generated screenshots to a third party tool which does the comparisons. (So in this case, no screenshots would be stored in your repository, and you never run verifyPaparazziDebug in your CI.)