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Voyeur Bundle Laravel Package
namshi/voyeur-bundle
Symfony bundle for integrating Namshi Voyeur into your application, providing convenient configuration and service wiring so developers can capture and inspect runtime activity for debugging and monitoring.
Take screenshots of your website before and after a deployment and then compare them.
Frequently asked questions about Voyeur Bundle
- Can I install namshi/voyeur-bundle in a Laravel application with Composer?
- No, not in any supported way. It is a Symfony bundle that boots through the Symfony kernel, dependency injection container, and configuration tree, none of which exist in Laravel's service-provider model. Requiring it alongside a Laravel 10 or 11 vendor tree will conflict with modern symfony/* transitive dependencies. Forcing the install with --ignore-platform-reqs produces runtime fatals rather than a working setup.
- What does namshi/voyeur-bundle actually do: screenshots or database audit logging?
- It is a visual regression tool. The real Namshi Voyeur drives a headless browser to capture screenshots of configured URLs, you deploy, it recaptures, and it diffs the before and after images to emit a pass or fail signal. Some catalog descriptions mistakenly frame it as a Doctrine entity audit-trail listener, which is a different product entirely. That contradiction is a due-diligence warning: read the source before planning anything around the documentation.
- Is namshi/voyeur-bundle still maintained?
- There is no evidence of active maintenance. The repository sits at roughly 32 stars with zero dependents, no recent patches, and no clear escalation path if something breaks. Its PhantomJS-era browser backend was archived in 2018 and has no ARM64 builds, so it is increasingly unhostable on modern CI runners. Treat it as frozen or abandoned when assessing risk.
- Which Symfony and Laravel versions is namshi/voyeur-bundle compatible with?
- It targets Symfony 2.x-era components, which is precisely why it cannot coexist with the Symfony 6 or 7 packages pulled in by a current Laravel 10 or 11 application. There is no Laravel version support to speak of, because the package was never built for Laravel at all. Dependency pins from that era will hard-conflict during Composer resolution.
- How do I add before/after deployment screenshot comparison to a Laravel app?
- Implement the pattern yourself rather than installing Voyeur. Write an Artisan command that reads a config-driven list of URLs, uses a maintained headless driver such as Playwright to capture a baseline and a post-deploy image, diffs them, and returns a non-zero exit code on failure. Keep the URL list and threshold settings in Laravel config and drive the command from your CI pipeline. The reusable asset is the workflow model, not the original PHP code.
- What are the best maintained alternatives to Voyeur for visual regression testing in Laravel?
- BackstopJS and Playwright's toHaveScreenshot assertion both give you the same before/after diff gate with an actively patched browser engine. Hosted services like Percy or Chromatic handle image storage, review UI, and approval workflows if you would rather not own the infrastructure. Any of these can be wired into an existing CI pipeline in days rather than weeks. All of them beat reviving an abandoned PhantomJS bundle.
- Can I run Voyeur as a sidecar container in my Laravel CI pipeline?
- That is one of the only two defensible integration routes, and only as a short-lived proof of concept. You run it as a standalone Symfony console application or sidecar container invoked from CI, with the Laravel app owning configuration and result reporting rather than execution. You are adopting the workflow, not the dependency, so plan to retire the container once the concept is validated. Never add it to the application's composer.json.
- Does Voyeur's diff tolerate antialiasing and font rendering differences?
- This is unverified and must be one of the first questions your spike answers. If the comparison is naive pixel-by-pixel, font hinting, antialiasing, and animation timing will generate false failures that erode trust in the gate. Modern tools offer configurable thresholds, ignore regions, and stabilization waits precisely because raw pixel diffing is noisy. Pin the browser and container image if you need deterministic rendering.
- How does Voyeur handle authenticated or session-gated pages?
- The mechanism is not documented in the available material, so you would need to read the capture layer in source. Realistically you would expect cookie injection, HTTP basic auth, or header passthrough, and any of those may need custom work. If most of your valuable templates sit behind a login, verify this before scoping a proof of concept. Maintained tools like Playwright handle this with storage-state reuse and scripted login flows out of the box.
- Is a short proof of concept on Voyeur worth the engineering time?
- Only if it is tightly scoped and time-boxed. A two-week spike on one or two high-traffic templates is defensible as a way to validate the release-gate concept and learn where rendering variance bites. It is not a path to a permanent production dependency, because the browser backend and Symfony constraints are hard blockers. Plan the exit before you start: most teams conclude they should lift the URL-list config schema and diff-threshold ideas into an Artisan command backed by a modern driver.
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