Plunder - QA for webpages

Playwright automates browsers using really nifty APIs built into web browsers.

This program builds on that to automate tasks for QA testing webpages. Thanks to Playwright, it works across all major browsers and operating systems.

Getting started

The Plunder CLI is published to npm as @eighty4/plunder and its API is published as @eighty4/plunder-core.

# run directly from npm
npx @eighty4/plunder -h

# install globally and run
npm i -g @eighty4/plunder@latest
plunder -h

CSS media query QA

Pludering webpages with --css-breakpoints will use LightningCSS to capture screenshots on a CSS breakpoint and 1px outside of a CSS breakpoint.

plunder --css-breakpoints --out-dir www_qa https://alistapart.com

Let's go back to the LightningCSS website again and appreciate those neon light effects!

Device emulation QA

Plunder takes screenshots of a webpage as they would look on phones, tablets or varying pixel density desktops.

Testing across modern devices

Capture screenshots emulating a curated selection of modern phones and tablets with --modern-devices:

plunder --modern-devices --out-dir www_qa https://alistapart.com

Selecting devices with --device queries

Device presets are available that can be added with --device or -d. This flag is a search param, so -d ipad will match all modern iPad devices.

# emulate ipad and iphone devices
plunder --device ipad --device iphone --out-dir www_qa  https://alistapart.com

# emulate high pixel density
plunder --device hidpi --out-dir www_qa https://alistapart.com

Listing devices

# list modern devices used with --modern-devices flag
plunder devices

# see result of an explicit device query
plunder -d hidpi devices

# see exhustive list of queryable devices
plunder -a devices

Webpage liveness and healthcheck QA

Checking a webpage's anchor tags

plunder links https://alistapart.com

Contributing

pnpm and Node >23 are required for development.

Plunder embraces Node's TypeScript support and uses TypeScript without compiling for development workflows. Node 23 will emit warnings about experimental type stripping support. Upgrading to Node 24 will help.

Upgrading to Node 24 with nvm

nvm install 24
nvm use 24
npm i -g pnpm

Or get Node.js from the source.

Build and run CLI

pnpm i
pnpm --filter \!@eighty4/plunder-webapp build
node cli/lib/plunder.js -h

Webapp development

Plunder out directories will have a web report written to the out directory's root. The web report is built with React and Vite and distributed with the CLI package @eighty4/plunder.

The webapp package's README.md has details on running the Vite app.

CICD checks

The ci_verify.sh script runs through all the CICD checks done on GitHub Actions:

./ci_verify.sh

The script has flags to symlink the ci_verify.sh as git hooks.

./ci_verify.sh --on-git-commit
./ci_verify.sh --on-git-push