Everything You Need to Know About Integrating Applitools with GitHub

Advanced Topics — Published June 16, 2021

Overview

Applitools is used by the world’s top organizations to help expedite time to market with Visual AI-powered functional & visual testing. Applitools easily fits into existing toolchains, turbo-charging CI/CD pipelines with AI-infused cross browser testing reducing test maintenance and slashing build times, allowing developers to test more, earlier.

With GitHub boasting over 56 million users as of September of 2020, it’s no surprise that a deep integration with Microsoft’s popular source control solution is critical to our customers’ app-dev workflows and thus success.

This article provides an overview of all the ways in which Applitools integrates with GitHub & GitHub Actions.

Use cases covered in this article:

  • What is UI Version Control? (read more)
  • Integration with GitHub via GitHub app (read more)
  • Integration with On-prem GitHub server (read more)
  • [Legacy Integration] with GitHub cloud and on-prem via direct integration (read more)
  • Integration with GitHub Actions (read more)

What is UI Version Control?

By enabling the Applitools / GitHub integration, you instantly unlock UI Version Control. With UI Version Control enabled, developers can easily correlate code changes with UI/UX updates for Visual UI version control across web and mobile apps. As branches are created in GitHub, Applitools UI Version Control automatically mirrors the branch and allows for a new set of baseline images. This process simplifies the automated testing of feature branches without impacting the trunk and its tests. Next, as PRs are merged back, UI Version Control automatically updates the target branch with the source branch’s baseline images while ensuring that no conflicts exist between branches, eliminating test maintenance overhead.

Integration with GitHub via GitHub app 

With Eyes 10.11, Applitools now officially supports visual source control via the GitHub app. This interface requires fewer permissions than the Applitools direct integration and is thus the officially recommended integration by the Applitools product team. For step by step instructions on enabling the GitHub integration via GitHub all, visit the integration documentation.

Integration with GitHub server which is installed on-prem

Another great addition to Eyes 10.11 is the ability for GitHub on-prem servers to leverage a new proxy service to eliminate the security challenges IT teams previously encountered with the legacy “direct connect” integration. Setup is quick and easy, simply enable the integration, get the GitHub app, and install the Applitools GitHub Proxy Service.

[Legacy Integration] with GitHub cloud and on-prem via direct integration 

Existing cloud & on-prem deployments who have our legacy direct integration already enabled can continue to enjoy backward compatibility. 

Integration with GitHub Actions

Microsoft describes GitHub Actions as an easy way to automate all your software workflows including with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

The Applitools integration requires your Applitools API Key and for you to pass Git Commit SHA as Applitools Batch ID. Once it’s all configured, GitHub Actions workflow understands when changes are made to code, and it automatically kicks off the workflow complete with your Visual AI powered test suite.

For more information, check out the article “How Do I Link GitHub Actions with Applitools?” from Satish Mallela 

Additional Source Control Integrations to unlock UI Version Control

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