Getting Started
If you have never done so before, you might want to pick and play with a few replays from our curated Replayable list (src: github.com/replayio/replayable).
Replay Basics
We wrote some blog posts outlining how Replay works internally, covering the basics of how we record OS syscalls, use “effective determinism” to reduce overhead, and turn browser processes in the cloud into a public API that can be used to introspect a program’s behavior:
Replay Architecture
Replay is a vast and complex system with many moving parts. The following is a largely simplified overview of how it works:
Components
- Replay Client [Open Source]
- The main Replay client that users are familiar with is the DevTools, which is the web app at https://app.replay.io/ (src: ). It allows you to select a previously recorded Replay and then replay it in our web-based Replay GUI.
- The Replay CLI (src: ) allows you to programmatically interact with a Replay.
- Test Suites [Open Source]
- Users can use our cypress and other runtime wrappers to easily record and replay entire test suites (src: ).
- Runtime [Open Source]
- The most prominent runtime is our “Replay Browser” based on Firefox (src: ), available in our Downloads section.
- We are currently working on a Chromium variant (src: ), and hope to provide even more runtimes in the future, including Node (src: ).
- NOTE: Even though these repos are open source, their open source development is currently not possible, since replaying custom build recordings requires non open source tools. We are looking forward to remedy that situation when we have the capacity to do so!
- Driver and Linker [Closed Source 🤐]
- The driver and linker are wrappers around the runtime (and actually very different in functionality from their namesakes). Their crucial roles are explained in this blog article.
- Backend, Dispatcher, Controller [Closed Source 🤐]
- TODO
More References
The Replay Protocol
For examples of how the Replay Protocol API is used, see the actual Replay DevTools client repo, the Replay Protocol API Examples repo, and the Protocol API docs