Taming Visual Regressions with Playwright and Docker

A practical walkthrough of building a Visual Regression Testing (VRT) pipeline using Playwright and Storybook for a shared UI component library. The post covers auto-discovering stories via Storybook's index.json, capturing pixel-based screenshots, and the key challenge of OS-dependent snapshot differences between macOS (local) and Linux (CI). The solution uses an official Playwright Docker image to standardize the rendering environment, with OS-specific snapshot directories where only Linux snapshots are committed. The pipeline acts as a mandatory CI gate, blocking merges on unexpected visual diffs.