routeplay

A command-line tool for checking that a page delivers the right content and metadata however you reach it. It compares the HTML your server sends, a fresh browser load and the result of clicking through from another page.

DownloadVersion 0.5.0

routeplay

About routeplay

You click a link, the page opens, everything looks fine. Then you refresh it and something breaks. Or the content changes correctly, but the title and canonical URL still belong to the previous page. Exactly the sort of thing you miss after spending an hour clicking around inside the same app.

RoutePlay turns those checks into something repeatable. Give it a few important journeys—category to article, listing to product, one language to another—and it follows real links in Chromium, then compares what it finds with a direct visit and the original server response.

It checks page titles, descriptions, canonical URLs, indexing directives, headings, main content, internal links and structured data. Browser errors and failed requests are recorded too, so you have more to work with than “this route looks a bit wrong.”

You can also tell it what a page is supposed to contain: a particular title, heading, piece of text or link. That matters because three versions of a page can agree with each other and still all be wrong.

When a check fails, it can save screenshots, captured HTML and browser error details. Useful when something breaks in CI and behaves perfectly the moment you try it yourself.

It’s written in TypeScript and uses Playwright. It works through HTTP requests and browser interactions, so you can use it to check sites built with Next.js, Nuxt, Astro and other frameworks. Run it locally while fixing a route, or keep a small set of important navigation checks in your release workflow.

Release history

Version 0.5.04 Oct 2026

Added

Added baseline recording and comparison: routeplay snapshot records the current behavior of every complete transition, check --baseline reports drift per surface with the RP4xx rule family, and check --update-baseline re-records deliberately instead of comparing.
Added authenticated captures with browser.storageState, --storage-state, and environment-backed browser.cookies. Cookies retain browser scoping rules, and credential values are redacted from reports, text artifacts, and baselines.
Added change-scoped runs: per-transition paths globs with --only-changed and --diff-base select the transitions a diff touches, and reports record the ref, matched files, and skipped transitions.
Added --repeat (and repeat) to report fields that change between identical captures (RP601) and repeated captures that fail (RP602).
Added expiring suppressions through ignore, with suppressed evidence retained in JSON and HTML and RP006 self-reporting an expired exception.
Added document language and hreflang semantics: <html lang> and alternate links are compared across surfaces (RP501, RP502), required by expect.lang (RP309), and checked for reciprocity between configured destinations (RP503).

Changed

Reports, SARIF, and the HTML matrix include run scope, repeat settings, and suppressed findings; suppressed findings no longer fail a run or appear in SARIF.
snapshot refuses to write a baseline when any transition is incomplete, and reports the findings it is freezing.

Fixed

Redacted reflected storage-state credentials, including structured local-storage values, and compared fresh captures with the same redaction as baselines.
Preserved invalid existing baselines during updates, validated unique transition names, and included source routes, anchor/readiness selectors, and stability settings in baseline compatibility checks.
Included both sides of Git renames and preserved Unicode, whitespace, and newline filenames in change-scoped runs, including from repository subdirectories.
Honored cookie paths, rejected ambiguous cookie scopes, and closed browser contexts when cookie initialization fails.
Included run scope and settings in SARIF, checked hreflang reciprocity against final destination URLs, and retained artifacts for failures found by that run-level check.
Updated the project homepage to https://nikocodes.com/software/routeplay/ and replaced obsolete npm publishing instructions with the Trusted Publishing release process.
Aligned the Docker browser image with the pinned Playwright dependency so packaged browser captures can launch.
Updated the locked transitive undici dependency to a patched release after the package audit reported upstream advisories.

External download

Download 0.5.0

Version 0.4.016 Sep 2026

Added

Added optional failure artifacts with per-surface DOM, full-page screenshots, and runtime/HTTP evidence, using index-prefixed transition directories and retaining the final failing attempt.
Added configurable transition concurrency (1–8) and retries (0–3), with matching CLI flags and configured result order preserved.
Added run settings, attempt counts, and artifact paths to reports, plus failure artifact uploads in the CI example.

Changed

Replaced repeated HTML serialization and parsing during stability polling with an in-page semantic signature. Final report extraction remains unchanged, and sampling does not invoke custom-element constructors.
Transition durations include all retry attempts. Artifact write failures wait for active workers to finish before returning.

Fixed

Retained available evidence for early navigation failures, replaced stale files when reusing a failing transition's artifact directory, and kept passing runs from creating artifact directories.
Redacted HTML-escaped credentials in artifact text and rejected empty artifact directory overrides.

External download

Download 0.4.0

Version 0.3.04 Sep 2026

Added

Added optional per-transition route contracts for exact title, description, canonical, H1, and robots expectations across server HTML, cold loads, and in-app navigation.
Added required JSON-LD type, main-content text, and crawlable-link checks with compact per-surface evidence in every report format.

External download

Download 0.3.0

Version 0.2.028 Aug 2026

Added

Added routeplay validate for checking configuration without launching Chromium.

Changed

Migrated npm releases to Trusted Publishing with GitHub Actions OIDC, removing the long-lived registry token.

External download

Download 0.2.0

Version 0.1.322 Aug 2026

Fixed

Report rejected npm publishing credentials with the exact token requirements needed for first-time package publication.

0.1.2 - 2026-08-22

Fixed

Verify npm authentication before publishing and target the public npm registry explicitly.

0.1.1 - 2026-08-22

Fixed

Kept the TypeScript toolchain compatible with the current tsup declaration build so automated dependency updates cannot break packaging.
Updated GitHub Actions runners to the current Node.js 24-based action releases.

0.1.0 - 2026-08-21

Added

Raw server, cold Chromium, and real-anchor transition captures.
Semantic parity rules for URL, metadata, H1, main text, links, and JSON-LD.
Browser page, console, request, and HTTP diagnostics.
Client/document navigation detection.
Strict JSON configuration with environment-backed origin-scoped headers.
Terminal, JSON, self-contained HTML, and SARIF reports.
Stable exit codes, init, doctor, and matching-Chromium install commands.
CI, Docker, framework guidance, synthetic browser fixtures, and package validation.

External download

Download 0.1.3

routeplay

About routeplay

Release history

Added

Changed

Fixed

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