automated screenshotting about freecbt HOT 1 OPEN

storybook seems like a winning approach for visualizing the ui states (including the hard part, i18n) we want to screenshot. not only can we browse ui states at our leisure, we get jest snapshot tests for free with storyshots! some pages may take some refactoring for this to work well, but that's very doable - no different than any other integration test, and way better than simulating clicks to setup the state we want to screenshot. I've used storybook before and have this part working.

frameit looks promising for fancypants screenshot postprocessing, though I haven't tried it yet. maybe later.

actually taking the screenshots automatically has been a bit harder:

• screengrab was what I'd hoped to use, but it appears to require ejecting from expo. also, no good for ios (though that's not a showstopper, we can fake it by hiding system ui)
• storycap refuses to connect to my @storybook/react-native-server, so it does nothing. debugging/troubleshooting has failed me, including the usual suspects of wipe/reinstall node_modules and local-network-ip instead of localhost.
• takeSnapshotAsync looks promising, but it appears gone in the latest version of expo, and I'd have to do quite a bit of test setup to use it since it's much lower-level than screengrab/storycap

also, all of these require an emulator - inevitably making CI runs slow and flaky, or if we leave it out of ci for faster runs, dep upgrades will break it when we need it.

...I think this automation is starting to cost more than the task it's automating. it might be best to take screenshots manually. if storybook's managing ui state for us, manual screenshotting is still tedious but not painful, and we don't have to do it often - and if we do solve automated screenshotting, storybook's still good for state management.

from freecbt.