How to Run Your First Test with Manta

By the end of this guide you'll have a finished run: a map of the pages and flows Manta reached in your app, and a list of the broken interactions it found along the way. It takes one URL and a few minutes of waiting — no test code, no selectors, no configuration.

Before you start

You need:

A free Manta account. Every account includes credits each month, and no card is required to run this.
A URL Manta can open — your production site, a staging deployment, or a preview URL. Apps that only run inside a private network can be tested with the Manta Runner (a later page covers it); for your first run, any URL Manta can reach is fine.
If the interesting parts of your app are behind a login, have a test account's credentials ready. You'll paste them in as part of starting the run.

Step 1 — Create a project

A project is just a home for everything Manta learns about one app: its runs, its map, its bugs. After you sign up, Manta walks you through creating your organization and first project.

Give the project a name you'll recognize and move on. You don't configure anything else here.

[Screenshot: the new-project screen with a name filled in]

Step 2 — Start a run

Open your project and start a new run. Manta asks for two things:

The URL to start from. Use the page you'd send a new user to — usually your app's root or its login page.
Credentials, if the app needs them. Enter a test account's email and password (or choose the sign-in method your app uses). Manta stores these so later runs can reuse them — save them to an environment and you won't re-enter them each time. Use a dedicated test account, not a real user's login.

Start the run.

[Screenshot: the start-a-run form with a URL and credentials entered]

Step 3 — Watch it explore

The run opens on a live progress view. Manta navigates your app the way a person would — loading the start page, deciding what's clickable, following links, filling in forms, and moving from one screen to the next. As it goes you'll see:

Pages discovered climbing as it reaches new parts of the app.
An events feed showing what it's doing right now — which page it's on, what it clicked, what happened.
Bugs appearing in a separate list the moment something breaks: a dead click, a failed form submit, a page that errors.

You don't have to stay on this screen. The run finishes on its own, and you can come back to it from the project's run list.

[Screenshot: the live run progress view mid-crawl, pages-discovered count and events feed visible]

Step 4 — Read the results

When the run completes you have two things worth looking at:

The bug list. Each entry is a specific broken interaction, with a screenshot of the moment it failed and the sequence of steps that led there — enough to reproduce it without guesswork. Start here; this is the "what do I need to fix" list.
The navigation map. A visual graph of every page Manta reached and how they connect. It shows you what got covered — and, just as usefully, what didn't. Reading it well is its own guide: How to Read the Navigation Map.

[Screenshot: a completed run showing the bug list with one bug expanded to its reproduction steps]

Tips and common mistakes

Start from the login page, not a deep link. If you drop Manta onto a page three clicks into a flow, it has less context for what the app is and where it can go. Begin where a real user begins.
Use a dedicated test account. Manta will click things — including buttons that create, edit, and delete data. Run it against an account and an environment where that's safe.
A short first run is fine. You don't need full coverage on day one. A quick run against staging tells you whether Manta can get into your app and gives you something concrete to react to.
Don't point it at a marketing site and expect app bugs. Manta shines on the interactive parts of a product — dashboards, forms, multi-step flows. A static landing page won't give it much to do.

What to try next

How to Read the Navigation Map — turn that graph into a coverage checklist.
How to Generate a Test Suite from a Plain-English Prompt — once you know which flows matter, pin them down so they're checked on every release.
See the whole approach in context on How Manta Works.

Ready to do this for real? Start a free run against your own app.