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Before you start

Before getting started, there a few items to note.

Expected technical skills

Not to scare you away, but the following skills are assumed:

  • Basic understanding of the command line
  • Intermediate understanding of CSS/SASS
  • Intermediate understanding of JavaScript

You can complete the exercises without these skills, but you may need to do a little extra research to fill in the details.

Computer setup

You will need to install some pre-requisites that the regression testing tools use. They are:

The things the tools need to run:

Ruby

I recommend using RVM or RBENV to easily manage Ruby installs. This helps with differences between the require version of Ruby between Wraith and DiffUX.

To check your version, open a command line and enter ruby -v. This will output the current version of Ruby you have running.

If it doesn’t match what you want, never fear. If you’re using RVM, you can install and use a different version fairly easily. RBENV should manage this for you.

Node

I recommend using NVM for Node. You can install Node manually, but NVM makes managing different versions much simpler.

Other Stuff

  • ImageMagick. Install via Homebrew: brew install imagemagick or via NPM (npm install -g imagemagick)
  • PhantomJS. Install via Homebrew (brew install phantomjs) or via NPM (npm install -g phantomjs)
  • CasperJS Install via Homebrew brew install casperjs or via NPM (npm install -g casperjs)

Having Installation Troubles?

You can use the thoughtbot/laptop repo to help with dependency installation. It is an install script that takes care of everything you need besides phantom/casper and the tools themselves.

PG gem install issues?

Check out this Stack Overflow question.

Try it on a virtual machine

Sometimes we customize our machines a little too much, or end up with an out of date dependency that just won’t upgrade, causing installation frustration and dependency nightmares. If you’re faced with a situation like this, you can try working off of a virtual machine using a tool like Vagrant. This tutorial doesn’t go in to detail on how to do that though.