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How to Use Percy for Visual Testing on Pull Requests

Percy adds visual checkpoints to your existing tests. Learn how to instrument stable UI states, run checks in pull-request CI, and review changes without treating every diff as a defect.
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Percy adds visual checkpoints to an existing test workflow: your tests capture selected, stable UI states, CI publishes them for comparison with an approved baseline, and reviewers decide whether each difference is intentional. For a Cypress project, Percy’s vendor tutorial demonstrates adding cy.percySnapshot(...) calls and running the suite with npx percy exec -- cypress run. Confirm current package names, options, and CI instructions in Percy’s documentation for your framework before adopting the example.

How Percy fits into pull-request testing

Percy complements functional tests rather than replacing them. Functional checks can establish that an interaction or route works; selected Percy snapshots give reviewers a way to inspect how the interface looks at particular checkpoints. A visual difference is evidence that appearance changed, not proof by itself that the change is a defect.

The basic loop is: instrument meaningful states, run the Percy-enabled tests in pull-request CI, compare the resulting visual build with an approved baseline, and have a person review the differences. When a design change is intentional, approving it advances the expected appearance; when it is not, fix the regression and rerun the checks.

Choose the visual states worth protecting

Capture meaningful checkpoints

Add snapshot calls after a page or component has reached the stable, user-visible state you want to protect. Give each snapshot a descriptive, consistent name so reviewers can recognize the page or component and its state. A focused set of important views is easier to review than snapshots that capture incidental or constantly changing UI; there is no universal optimal snapshot count established here.

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Reduce noisy comparisons

Wait until asynchronous content has settled before capturing. Animations, delayed data, and other changing content can create differences unrelated to the code change reviewers care about. Choose stable states that reflect what a user should see, and keep snapshot naming consistent across runs.

Connect your tests to a Percy project

  1. Create or select the Percy project that should receive the visual builds.

  2. Make that project’s token available to the test process through an environment variable. Do not commit the token to source control; configure it as a secret in your CI provider.

  3. Check that local runs and pull-request jobs use the intended project and token. The exact secret setup and environment-variable handling depend on your CI provider.

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Instrument and run a Cypress suite

Percy’s vendor Cypress tutorial demonstrates installing @percy/cli and @percy/cypress, adding snapshot calls, supplying the project token through the environment, and wrapping the Cypress run with Percy. These package names and instructions are tutorial examples, not a guarantee that they are the current package names or syntax for every version.

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Example snapshot placement

Place the call at a stable point in an existing Cypress test, after the page or component has reached the state you intend to review:

cy.percySnapshot('Account settings — profile loaded');

Use names that describe both the view and relevant state. The surrounding test should establish that state before the snapshot call.

Example Cypress command

For the Cypress integration shown in the vendor tutorial, the wrapper command is:

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npx percy exec -- cypress run

Run this in the job that executes the relevant Cypress tests. Verify the current Percy integration instructions for your framework and CLI version before relying on the command in a production workflow.

Run Percy in pull-request CI

Add the Percy-enabled test run to the CI job that runs for pull requests. The purpose is to publish a visual build associated with the proposed change so reviewers can inspect the captured states alongside the code review. Exact workflow syntax, secret configuration, and status-check behavior depend on your CI provider and Percy configuration; confirm those details in the current documentation for your setup.

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Choose between end-to-end pages and component stories

Approach What it captures Best fit to consider
Cypress snapshots Selected states reached during end-to-end tests, such as a page after a user flow or data load. Teams already using Cypress that want visual checkpoints within their existing browser tests.
Storybook snapshots Component states represented by stories. Percy’s vendor material describes building a static Storybook output, setting the Percy token, running Percy against that output, and adding the command to CI. Teams that want focused review of component variants and states. Confirm the current exact command and configuration in Percy’s Storybook integration instructions.

These approaches can address different review needs: stories isolate component states, while end-to-end tests can cover pages and user journeys. A team may choose one or both based on the UI states it needs to protect and its existing test setup. For Selenium, Playwright, or another framework, use that framework’s current Percy integration guide rather than adapting the Cypress command by assumption.

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Review visual changes and update the baseline

  1. Open the visual build produced for the pull request and inspect the changed snapshots in context.

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  2. Decide whether each difference is an intended design change or an unintended regression. A diff identifies a change; it does not make that decision.

  3. For an intentional change, approve the expected visual state so future builds compare against it.

  4. For an unintended change, fix the UI or test setup and rerun the checks before accepting the change.

Do not approve differences mechanically. Reviewing the actual changed view helps distinguish a deliberate redesign from an accidental shift, missing element, or capture taken before the UI settled.

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Troubleshoot common setup problems

The Percy run cannot connect to the intended project

Check that the correct project token is available to the test process and that the CI secret is exposed to the pull-request job as expected. Confirm the variable name and setup against the current instructions for your Percy integration and CI provider; do not solve the problem by committing the token.

The command fails before Cypress runs

The demonstrated wrapper is specific to the Cypress integration and may not match a different framework, package version, or current CLI setup. Verify the installed Percy packages and the current Cypress integration instructions before changing the command. Do not assume the same wrapper works unchanged for Storybook, Playwright, or Selenium.

Visual differences appear inconsistent

Check whether snapshots run before delayed content has loaded or while animations or other changing UI are active. Move the checkpoint to a stable, user-visible state and keep the snapshot set focused on the views that matter.

Reviewers cannot tell what a snapshot represents

Use consistent, descriptive names that identify the component or page and its state. If the test does not clearly establish that state, improve the test setup so the capture point has an unambiguous meaning.

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Or skip the browser setup

If you need a clean screenshot of a URL rather than pull-request baseline comparisons, ScreenshotNeo is a separate screenshot API and MCP server. It does not replace Percy’s visual-build and baseline-review workflow.

The one-call API example below requests a WebP screenshot of Stripe; replace the target URL with the page you need. See the ScreenshotNeo API documentation for request options.

curl -G "https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot" -d access_key=YOUR_API_KEY --data-urlencode url=https://stripe.com -o shot.webp

ScreenshotNeo accepts cookie or consent banners before capture and removes more than 60 known consent platforms, newsletter popups, and chat widgets; each step can be turned off. Bot checks or CAPTCHAs, blank pages, timeouts, failed loads, and cache hits are not billed, and response headers report the page verdict and billing status. Its MCP server provides take_screenshot, get_page_info, and capture_pdf tools for AI agents. The Free plan includes 1,000 screenshots per month with no card; paid plans start at $5 for 3,000 screenshots.

Sign up for ScreenshotNeo’s free plan to get 1,000 screenshots a month with no card.

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