# bbc/wraith

Wraith — A responsive screenshot comparison tool

Repository: https://github.com/bbc/wraith
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/wraith
Homepage: http://bbc.github.io/wraith/
Language: Ruby
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Archived: true
Last push: 2026-01-16T00:13:59+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 62, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 4970, "days_push": 230, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4821, forks 351 (observed 2026-08-28T04:09:00.529239+00:00)

## What it is
Wraith is a Ruby CLI tool from BBC News that takes screenshots of webpages with a headless browser across different environments or points in time, then generates image diffs highlighting changed areas. It outputs diff PNGs, a change-percentage report, and an HTML gallery, and can fail CI builds when diffs exceed a threshold.

## Use cases
- compare screenshots of staging vs production sites
- visual regression testing for responsive web pages
- detect unintended CSS changes after a deploy
- compare a website against itself over time
- screenshot specific components via CSS selectors
- run screenshot comparisons in CI pipelines

## When to choose
- you need automated visual diffing of web pages at multiple screen widths
- you want a simple Ruby gem for screenshot comparison with CI exit codes
- you're maintaining a legacy setup already built around Wraith

## When to avoid
- starting a new project - the repo is explicitly unmaintained and issues/PRs are not monitored
- you rely on PhantomJS/CasperJS, which are themselves deprecated
- you need actively supported visual regression tooling like Percy, BackstopJS, or Playwright screenshot tests

## Facets
- artifact type: cli-tool
- maturity: abandoned
- function: testing, image-processing, e2e-testing
- domain: web-development, testing, developer-tools
- platform: cli, cross-platform, ruby
- tags: visual-regression, screenshot-diff, responsive-design, headless-browser, unmaintained

## Member repositories
- bbc/wraith (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:00.529239+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:18:32.016662+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/bbc/wraith (fetched 2026-08-28T04:09:00.529239+00:00, sha ab0113310a78)
  - homepage: http://bbc.github.io/wraith/ (fetched 2026-08-29T09:01:23.980085+00:00, sha c71250ec6f6f)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.