rive 0.14.3 - Does not render in golden tests with renderer `flutter`

[JulianBissekkou]

Edit: I updated the title of the issue after clarifying that the used renderer (rive) should not be used for golden tests. However, there is still a bug that the rendering does not work by using the proposed flutter renderer.

Description

When running an golden or widget test that includes a rive widget the test fails with the following error:

00:02 +0: MyApp Golden Tests MyApp should match golden file                                                                               Shell: Assertion failed: (factory), function File, file file.cpp, line 170.
unhandled error during finalization of test:
/Users/julianbissekkou/Downloads/rive_example/test/golden/my_app_golden_test.dart
TestDeviceException(Shell subprocess crashed with SIGABRT (-6).)
#0      FlutterTesterTestDevice.finished (package:flutter_tools/src/test/flutter_tester_device.dart:254:5)
<asynchronous suspension>
#1      FlutterTesterTestDevice.kill (package:flutter_tools/src/test/flutter_tester_device.dart:236:5)
<asynchronous suspension>
#2      FlutterPlatform._startTest.<anonymous closure> (package:flutter_tools/src/test/flutter_platform.dart:696:9)
<asynchronous suspension>
#3      FlutterPlatform._startTest.finalize (package:flutter_tools/src/test/flutter_platform.dart:597:11)
<asynchronous suspension>
#4      FlutterPlatform._startTest (package:flutter_tools/src/test/flutter_platform.dart:769:7)
<asynchronous suspension>

Steps To Reproduce

Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Create a simple page that displays a rive widget
2. Create a golden test for that page
3. Run the golden test
4. See error ⚠️

Source .riv/.rev file

You can use any riv file that you want. In my example I just used this one that I found in some example repo online.
https://cdn.rive.app/animations/vehicles.riv

Expected behavior

No crash, golden image gets rendered

Screenshot

Device & Versions (please complete the following information)

e.g.:

[✓] Flutter (Channel stable, 3.32.5, on macOS 15.5 24F74 darwin-arm64, locale en-US)
[✓] Android toolchain - develop for Android devices (Android SDK version 35.0.0)
[✓] Xcode - develop for iOS and macOS (Xcode 16.3)
[✓] Chrome - develop for the web
[✓] Android Studio (version 2024.3)
[✓] IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition (version 2025.1.1.1)
[✓] Connected device (4 available)
[✓] Network resources

• No issues found!

Additional context

I created a repository with an example right here:
https://github.com/JulianBissekkou/rive_golden_issue

[JulianBissekkou]

The repository copies the binary used for rive manually. This is due to #354 .
Feel free to ignore this

[HayesGordon]

This one is on my radar; thanks, @JulianBissekkou. The next release will auto-copy the binaries so they're discoverable when running tests using the rive_native package from Pub.

[JulianBissekkou]

Great! Just to make sure things are clear: This issue is actually not about copying any binaries, more about the error when running in a golden test. I don't think that the 2 things are connected to each other, but if they are then feel free to ignore this comment.

[HayesGordon]

Ah thanks for clarifying @JulianBissekkou. These are different then.

Note that in the next release you will not need to copy over the lib yourself. rive_native will find it automatically.

I think the problem might be that you're using Factory.rive, which will not work as the testing environment will not be able to create the native textures and context needed to run the Rive Renderer.

For golden tests you can use Factory.flutter, which uses the built-in Flutter renderer and works in the Flutter test environment. That is how we do golden tests for rive_native as well. Everything will look the same, except the Flutter renderer does not support Vector Feathering.

Note that the Rive Renderer has a lot of other golden testing that we do natively (separate from Flutter).

[JulianBissekkou]

Thank you for the fast response!
Very much looking forward to the automatic binary copying :D The new setup dart script is already very cool! 💪🏽 Congrats to the team for improving the dev experience.

I think it makes sense to improve the docs on the different renderers (in dart code) to help people choose the right renderer for the correct use case. 👍🏽

I updated the renderer to flutter in the example repository, but I can't get a frame to be rendered. Previously (0.13.x) this worked now the rive widget is not rendering anything and it shows whatever is behind it. (See JulianBissekkou/rive_golden_issue@c87c60e)

[HayesGordon]

Thanks for pointing this out! This will be fixed in the next release

[JulianBissekkou]

Do you have an ETA for the release?

[HayesGordon]

@JulianBissekkou this should now be fixed in the latest version, both:

• Automatically getting the native libs
• The first frame not rendering anything if active is false

[JulianBissekkou]

Can you please reopen the issue?
Looks like the native libs are not automatically downloaded because I am getting Invalid argument(s): Failed to lookup symbol 'init': dlsym(RTLD_DEFAULT, init): symbol not found

[HayesGordon]

@JulianBissekkou sorry I described it incorrectly. Our scripts will automatically move the native libs to a location that is discoverable by Flutter tests. But unfortunately there isn't way for us to automatically trigger those scripts when running flutter test - that I know of. So the fix is more: "the native libs are now discoverable, and under some conditions might be automatically downloaded".

We're able to trigger the scripts as part of the native platform builds when doing a flutter run or flutter build.

We're waiting for this to land to better support making our native libraries available

For the current best experience, I'm leaning towards updating our documentation to say that users should always manually run:

dart run rive_native:setup --verbose --clean --platform macos,windows,linux

The first time you download a specific Rive package version.

[JulianBissekkou]

Thanks for clarifying :)