Baseline management

Choose the right baseline management strategy for your visual test workflow.

When setting up a new project in Percy, we must define various parameters. These include choosing the project type (web or mobile application), assigning a distinctive project name, and linking it to a repository. Furthermore, we need to decide between Git or Visual Git baseline management and determine whether Percy or Automate will handle browser selection.

On this page, we will explore the two baseline management options exclusively offered by Percy: Git and Visual Git.

Git vs Visual Git

Percy’s baseline management strategies enable you to choose the appropriate baseline for comparison. This simplifies the process of decision making for the visual changes detected within your application.

Git operates similarly to Git-based branching comparisons. When code changes occur in a branch and are subsequently merged with the main or production branch, this strategy comes into play. The second strategy, Visual Git, functions differently. Here, each branch is assigned its own branch-level baseline, containing the latest approved snapshots for visual comparisons.

When to choose what strategy?

Choose Git if you are a developer and your answer to the following questions is yes:

• Do you work on multiple feature branches, which generally need to be compared against the main branch?
• Do you look for comparison against base branch which is main?
• Do you work with approvals or rejections at the build level?

Choose Visual Git if you are a QA/SDET and your answer to the following questions is yes:

• Do you work with approvals or rejections at the snapshot level?
• Do you want comparisons against latest approved snapshot only?
• Do you want to perform your visual testing outside/independently of the development pipeline?

Select the baseline management strategy

To select the baseline management strategy, follow these steps:

1. Visit https://percy.io/
2. Go to dashboard & click “Create new project”.
3. Select Web as the platform.
4. Select Git or Visual Git as a baseline management strategy.

To change the baseline management strategy, select the project you wish to modify, navigate to the Project settings page, and toggle the desired option under Baseline management.

Check more details about the Git and Visual Git baseline management strategy.

• Git
• Visual Git