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-------snapshot
Automate taking localized screenshots of your iOS app on every device
You have to manually create 20 (languages) x 6 (devices) x 5 (screenshots) = 600 screenshots.
It's hard to get everything right!
- New screenshots with every (design) update
- No loading indicators
- Same content / screens
- Clean Status Bar
- Uploading screenshots (
deliver
is your friend)
More information about creating perfect screenshots.
snapshot
runs completely in the background - you can do something else, while your computer takes the screenshots for you.
Get in contact with the developer on Twitter: @FastlaneTools
snapshot
with UI Tests in Xcode 7
Note: New Apple announced a new version of Xcode with support for UI Tests built in right into Xcode. This technology allows snapshot
to be even better: Instead of dealing with UI Automation Javascript code, you are now be able to write the screenshot code in Swift or Objective C allowing you to use debugging features like breakpoints.
As a result, snapshot
was completely rewritten from ground up without changing its public API.
Please check out the MigrationGuide to 1.0 👍
Why change to UI Tests?
- UI Automation is deprecated
- UI Tests will evolve and support even more features in the future
- UI Tests are much easier to debug
- UI Tests are written in Swift or Objective C
- UI Tests can be executed in a much cleaner and better way
Features • Installation • UI Tests • Quick Start • Usage • Tips • How? • Need help?
snapshot
is part of fastlane: connect all deployment tools into one streamlined workflow.
Features
- Create hundreds of screenshots in multiple languages on all simulators
- Configure it once, store the configuration in git
- Do something else, while the computer takes the screenshots for you
- Integrates with
fastlane
anddeliver
- Generates a beautiful web page, which shows all screenshots on all devices. This is perfect to send to Q&A or the marketing team
snapshot
automatically waits for network requests to be finished before taking a screenshot (we don't want loading images in the App Store screenshots)
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After snapshot
successfully created new screenshots, it will generate a beautiful HTML file to get a quick overview of all screens:
Why?
This tool automatically switches the language and device type and runs UI Tests for every combination.
Why should I automate this process?
- It takes hours to take screenshots
- You get a great overview of all your screens, running on all available simulators without the need to manually start it hundreds of times
- Easy verification for translators (without an iDevice) that translations do make sense in real App context
- Easy verification that localizations fit into labels on all screen dimensions
- It is an integration test: You can test for UI elements and other things inside your scripts
- Be so nice, and provide new screenshots with every App Store update. Your customers deserve it
- You realise, there is a spelling mistake in one of the screens? Well, just correct it and re-run the script
Installation
Install the gem
sudo gem install snapshot
Make sure, you have the latest version of the Xcode command line tools installed:
xcode-select --install
UI Tests
Getting started
This project uses Apple's newly announced UI Tests. I will not go into detail on how to write scripts.
Here a few links to get started:
- WWDC 2015 Introduction to UI Tests
- A first look into UI Tests
- UI Testing in Xcode 7
- HSTestingBackchannel : ‘Cheat’ by communicating directly with your app
- Automating App Store screenshots using fastlane snapshot and frameit
Note: Since there is no official way to trigger a screenshot from UI Tests, snapshot
uses a workaround (described in How Does It Work?) to trigger a screenshot. If you feel like this should be done right, please duplicate radar 23062925.
Quick Start
- Create a new UI Test target in your Xcode project (top part of this article)
- Run
snapshot init
in your project folder - Add the ./SnapshotHelper.swift to your UI Test target (You can move the file anywhere you want)
- (Objective C only) add the bridging header to your test class.
#import "MYUITests-Swift.h"
- The bridging header is named after your test target with -Swift.h appended.
- In your UI Test class, click the
Record
button on the bottom left and record your interaction - To take a snapshot, call the following between interactions
- Swift:
snapshot("01LoginScreen")
- Objective C:
[Snapshot snapshot:@"01LoginScreen" waitForLoadingIndicator:YES];
- Add the following code to your
setUp()
method
Swift
let app = XCUIApplication()
setupSnapshot(app)
app.launch()
Objective C
XCUIApplication *app = [[XCUIApplication alloc] init];
[Snapshot setupSnapshot:app];
[app launch];
You can take a look at the example project to play around with it.
Usage
snapshot
Your screenshots will be stored in the ./screenshots/
folder by default (or ./fastlane/screenshots
if you're using fastlane)
If any error occurs while running the snapshot script on a device, that device will not have any screenshots, and snapshot
will continue with the next device or language. To stop the flow after the first error, run
snapshot --stop_after_first_error
Also by default, snapshot
will open the HTML after all is done. This can be skipped with the following command
snapshot --stop_after_first_error --skip_open_summary
There are a lot of options available that define how to build your app, for example
snapshot --scheme "UITests" --configuration "Release" --sdk "iphonesimulator"
Reinstall the app before running snapshot
snapshot --reinstall_app --app_identifier "tools.fastlane.app"
By default snapshot
automatically retries running UI Tests if they fail. This is due to randomly failing UI Tests (e.g. #372). You can adapt this number using
snapshot --number_of_retries 3
Add photos and/or videos to the simulator before running snapshot
snapshot --add_photos MyTestApp/Assets/demo.jpg --add_videos MyTestApp/Assets/demo.mp4
For a list for all available options run
snapshot --help
After running snapshot
you will get a nice summary:
Snapfile
All of the available options can also be stored in a configuration file called the Snapfile
. Since most values will not change often for your project, it is recommended to store them there:
First make sure to have a Snapfile
(you get it for free when running snapshot init
)
The Snapfile
can contain all the options that are also available on snapshot --help
scheme "UITests"
devices([
"iPhone 6",
"iPhone 6 Plus",
"iPhone 5",
"iPhone 4s"
])
languages([
"en-US",
"de-DE",
"es-ES",
["pt", "pt_BR"] # Portuguese with Brazilian locale
])
launch_arguments("-username Felix")
# The directory in which the screenshots should be stored
output_directory './screenshots'
clear_previous_screenshots true
add_photos ["MyTestApp/Assets/demo.jpg"]
Completely reset all simulators
You can run this command in the terminal to delete and re-create all iOS simulators:
snapshot reset_simulators
Warning: This will delete all your simulators and replace by new ones! This is useful, if you run into weird problems when running snapshot
.
You can use the environment variable SNAPSHOT_FORCE_DELETE
to stop asking for confirmation before deleting.
Update snapshot helpers
Some updates require the helper files to be updated. snapshot
will automatically warn you and tell you how to update.
Basically you can run
snapshot update
to update your SnapshotHelper.swift
files. In case you modified your SnapshotHelper.swift
and want to manually update the file, check out SnapshotHelper.swift.
Launch Arguments
You can provide additional arguments to your app on launch. These strings will be available in your code through NSProcessInfo.processInfo().arguments
. Alternatively use user-default syntax (-key value
) and they will be available as key-value pairs in NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults()
.
snapshot
includes -FASTLANE_SNAPSHOT YES
, which will set a temporary user default for the key FASTLANE_SNAPSHOT
, you may use this to detect when the app is run by snapshot
.
if NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults().boolForKey("FASTLANE_SNAPSHOT") {
// runtime check that we are in snapshot mode
}
username.text = NSUserDefaults.standardUserDefaults().stringForKey("username")
// username.text = "Felix"
Specify multiple argument strings and snapshot
will generate screenshots for each combination of arguments, devices, and languages. This is useful for comparing the same screenshots with different feature flags, dynamic text sizes, and different data sets.
# Snapfile for A/B Test Comparison
launch_arguments([
"-secretFeatureEnabled YES",
"-secretFeatureEnabled NO"
])
How does it work?
The easiest solution would be to just render the UIWindow into a file. That's not possible because UI Tests don't run on a main thread. So snapshot
uses a different approach:
When you run unit tests in Xcode, the reporter generates a plist file, documenting all events that occured during the tests (More Information). Additionally, Xcode generates screenshots before, during and after each of these events. There is no way to manually trigger a screenshot event. The screenshots and the plist files are stored in the DerivedData directory, which snapshot
stores in a temporary folder.
When the user calls snapshot(...)
in the UI Tests (Swift or Objective C) the script actually does a rotation to .Unknown
which doesn't have any effect on the actual app, but is enough to trigger a screenshot. It has no effect to the application and is not something you would do in your tests. The goal was to find some event that a user would never trigger, so that we know it's from snapshot
.
snapshot
then iterates through all test events and check where we did this weird rotation. Once snapshot
has all events triggered by snapshot
it collects a ordered list of all the file names of the actual screenshots of the application.
In the test output, the Swift snapshot
function will print out something like this
snapshot: [some random text here]
snapshot
finds all these entries using a regex. The number of snapshot
outputs in the terminal and the number of snapshot
events in the plist file should be the same. Knowing that, snapshot
automatically matches these 2 lists to identify the name of each of these screenshots. They are then copied over to the output directory and separated by language and device.
2 thing have to be passed on from snapshot
to the xcodebuild
command line tool:
- The device type is passed via the
destination
parameter of thexcodebuild
parameter - The language is passed via a temporary file which is written by
snapshot
before running the tests and read by the UI Tests when launching the application
If you find a better way to do any of this, please submit an issue on GitHub or even a pull request 👍
Also, feel free to duplicate radar 23062925.
Tips
fastlane
Toolchain
fastlane
: Connect all deployment tools into one streamlined workflowdeliver
: Upload screenshots, metadata and your app to the App Storeframeit
: Quickly put your screenshots into the right device framesPEM
: Automatically generate and renew your push notification profilessigh
: Because you would rather spend your time building stuff than fighting provisioningproduce
: Create new iOS apps on iTunes Connect and Dev Portal using the command linecert
: Automatically create and maintain iOS code signing certificatesspaceship
: Ruby library to access the Apple Dev Center and iTunes Connectpilot
: The best way to manage your TestFlight testers and builds from your terminalboarding
: The easiest way to invite your TestFlight beta testersgym
: Building your iOS apps has never been easierscan
: The easiest way to run tests of your iOS and Mac appmatch
: Easily sync your certificates and profiles across your team using git
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Frame the screenshots
If you want to add frames around the screenshots and even put a title on top, check out frameit.
Available language codes
ALL_LANGUAGES = ["da", "de-DE", "el", "en-AU", "en-CA", "en-GB", "en-US", "es-ES", "es-MX", "fi", "fr-CA", "fr-FR", "id", "it", "ja", "ko", "ms", "nl", "no", "pt-BR", "pt-PT", "ru", "sv", "th", "tr", "vi", "zh-Hans", "zh-Hant"]
To get more information about language and locale codes please read Internationalization and Localization Guide.
Use a clean status bar
You can use SimulatorStatusMagic to clean up the status bar.
Snapfile
Editing the Change syntax highlighting to Ruby.
Simulator doesn't launch the application
When the app dies directly after the application is launched there might be 2 problems
- The simulator is somehow in a broken state and you need to re-create it. You can use
snapshot reset_simulators
to reset all simulators (this will remove all installed apps) - A restart helps very often
Determine language
To detect the currently used localization in your tests, use the following code:
You can access the language using the `deviceLanguage` variable.
Need help?
Please submit an issue on GitHub and provide information about your setup
Code of Conduct
Help us keep snapshot
open and inclusive. Please read and follow our Code of Conduct.
License
This project is licensed under the terms of the MIT license. See the LICENSE file.
This project and all fastlane tools are in no way affiliated with Apple Inc. This project is open source under the MIT license, which means you have full access to the source code and can modify it to fit your own needs. All fastlane tools run on your own computer or server, so your credentials or other sensitive information will never leave your own computer. You are responsible for how you use fastlane tools.