Automated screenshots in Flutter (without pain)

For me, screenshots of apps was always a painful theme. I think we’ve all been there: You find an absolutely perfect tool, it’s simple and minimalistic (judging by screenshots from its website). You download it, open it, and it looks completely different. It’s a little bit disappointing.

Pre-made libraries and other ways

I’m building my app with Flutter called sudoku. Just before the first release I found out that I have no screenshots for my app. I had two options to make them:

1. By hand
2. Using some kind of script

My app grows quickly and interface changes fast, which means that screenshotting by hand is dumb idea. So I started looking into how I can implement automated screenshots. I, again, had many options:

1. This article. It is very complex in my opinion, and, I need simple plain screenshots without any text on them. Plus there is no source code available.
2. auto_screenshot library, which is working only if app uses deep-linking (link)
3. screenshots library, which is Dart 3 incompatible (link)
4. … and many more I forgot to list here

As you can see, I did not quite like any of these approaches. So, I tried to create my own.

My solution

My solution uses only flutter_test and integration_test. That’s all! Here is a repo where you can find everything mentioned in this guide.

Step 1. Adding dependencies

Go to your project and open pubspec.yaml. Find a line that says dev_dependencies. Add this lines somewhere at the bottom:

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dev_dependencies:
  flutter_test:
    sdk: flutter

  integration_test:
    sdk: flutter

Run flutter pub get.

Step 2. Create test file

Inside your project, create a folder called integration_test. Inside it, create file named as you wish, but with _test.dart on the end. Mine is named screenshots_test.dart. Inside this file, insert following lines:

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import 'package:flutter_test/flutter_test.dart';
import 'package:integration_test/integration_test.dart';

void main() {
  IntegrationTestWidgetsFlutterBinding.ensureInitialized();

  // If you have something async to setup, before running your app,
  // do it in this function
  setUpAll(() async {
    // Right here.
  });
}

Step 3. Write tests

At this step, our actions might be different, depending on the structure of your app. But I will show you, how to do screenshots with standard app, which flutter create somename produces.

I have this function, called makeScreenshot, here is what it does:

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void makeScreenshot(
    Widget w, String testName, String fileName, Function(WidgetTester) actions) {
  testWidgets(testName, (WidgetTester tester) async {
    // Change size of screen
    tester.view.physicalSize = const Size(1080 / 2, 1920 / 2);

    // Make flutter to simulate Android platform
    // This is done in order to get more Android-looking screenshots
    debugDefaultTargetPlatformOverride = TargetPlatform.android;

    // Adding widget to the test
    await tester.pumpWidget(w);

    // Waiting a little, so that flutter renders it
    // Might be unnecessary in your case
    await tester.pumpAndSettle(const Duration(milliseconds: 100));

    await actions(tester);

    // The golden test: Finding our app in the test by type, and
    // comparing it with previous screenshot
    await expectLater(
      find.byType(MyApp),
      matchesGoldenFile('screenshots/$fileName.png'),
    );

    // To prevent an error, setting this to null
    debugDefaultTargetPlatformOverride = null;
  });
}

With this function I can create some nice-looking screenshots of my default app. At the end of main function I inserted this:

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makeScreenshot(
  const MyApp(),
  "Default page",
  "default_page",
  // No need to do anything in test, simple home page screenshot
  (tester) => null,
);

Then I run flutter test integration_test --update-goldens. And there I have it! Screenshot of default page located at integration_test/screenshots/default_page.png.

“But that’s boring”, you might say, “What if I need to click on some buttons or do something else before screenshot is taken?” I got you, that is easy too! Let’s say that we have a button with an add icon on this page, and we want to tap on it. Just add another makeScreenshot call below the first one and modify it a bit.

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makeScreenshot(
  const MyApp(),
  "Incremented page",
  "incremented_page",
  (tester) async {
    // finding button by Icon and tapping on it
    await tester.tap(find.byIcon(Icons.add));
    // waiting a little bit
    await tester.pumpAndSettle();
  },
);

find and tester have other useful methods. You can find them in the documentation, both for find and tester.

Run flutter test integration_test --update-goldens again, and there you have it, another screenshot.

Ending

That’s it for now! Again, you can find everything I did here in this GitHub repo. Also, here is an example of how I do it in my project.