# How to test plot recipes?
**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648
**Category:** Visualization
**Tags:** question, testing, plotting, recipe
**Created:** [March 14, 2017, 1:55am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648 "2017-03-14T01:55:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 6
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2017, 1:55am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648/1 "2017-03-14T01:55:39Z")
Plot recipes can reduce the test coverage considerably. For example, my coverage is currently at 76% and a big part of the remaining 24% is due to a plot recipe: [Codecov](https://codecov.io/gh/juliohm/ImageQuilting.jl/src/master/src/plot_recipes.jl)
How should I go about testing plot recipes? Is there any way to design meaningful tests without human interaction?
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### Author:  [@tbreloff](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/tbreloff)
#### Post date: [March 14, 2017, 2:39am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648/2 "2017-03-14T02:39:06Z")
[https://github.com/JuliaPlots/VisualRegressionTests.jl](https://github.com/JuliaPlots/VisualRegressionTests.jl)
Or you could just call RecipesBase.apply\_recipe with arguments that will
dispatch to your recipe.
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### Author:  [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)
#### Post date: [March 24, 2017, 2:05am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648/3 "2017-03-24T02:05:19Z")
@tbreloff I really like the idea of VisualRegressionTests.jl, but apparently I am missing something about how it works. As you can see, the recipe itself is not covered by the tests that I wrote: [Codecov](https://codecov.io/gh/juliohm/ImageQuilting.jl/src/master/src/plot_recipes.jl)
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### Author:  [@giordano](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/giordano)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2017, 12:33am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648/4 "2017-10-16T00:33:31Z")
> [@tbreloff](#):
>
> Or you could just call RecipesBase.apply\_recipe with arguments that will
> dispatch to your recipe.
It’s not clear to me how to use this way of testing. Should the first argument to `RecipesBase.apply_recipe` be an empty dictionary `Dict{Symbol,Any}()`?
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### Author:  [@juliohm](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/juliohm)
#### Post date: [October 16, 2017, 12:39am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648/5 "2017-10-16T00:39:05Z")
As a side comment, this coverage issue doesn’t exist anymore. It was fixed somewhere in Plots.jl or VisualRegressionTests.jl.
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### Author:  [@giordano](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/giordano)
#### Post date: [April 24, 2020, 3:29pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/how-to-test-plot-recipes/2648/6 "2020-04-24T15:29:29Z")
For the record, this is what I ended up doing for testing plot recipes `Measurements.jl`:
>
Note that this is using some internals of `RecipesBase.jl`, so use it at your own risk 🙂
Sorry for necroposting, but I see that this thread comes is among first results when searching for plotting tests in Julia, so I thought it could be useful to point out this option.