Roadmap

Ideas worth keeping track of, but not scheduled into any milestone yet:

• Match diagnostics on demand (VCR_DEBUG_MATCHING=1) — a full match trace for every interaction × matcher, not just when nothing matches at all.
• diff — a semantic diff between two versions of the same cassette (JSON Pointer level, not line-by-line), for reviewing what an updated recording actually changed.
• A repair run: replay, then re-record only what failed on its cassette — one command that runs the suite in playback, collects the tests that failed on a cassette (no match, no file, gone stale — not on an assertion), and re-runs just those with recording forced for their cassettes. Today that loop is manual: read which failed, assemble a --filter, add VCR_ERASE_TAPE. Different from update in where the scope comes from — update is handed a cassette name, this reads it off a run.
• update — re-record a cassette, show a semantic diff of what changed, and ask for confirmation instead of blindly overwriting.
• Schema drift detection — flag when a re-recorded interaction’s JSON shape changed (fields added or removed), independent of staleAfter, which only measures elapsed time.
• Subset JSON matching — alongside the current strict BodyJsonMatcher, a mode where the recorded body only needs to be a subset of the incoming one, or vice versa.
• MultipartMatcher — structural matching for multipart/form-data, since a random boundary makes raw body matching useless.
• CookieMatcher / SetCookieMatcher — structural parsing of Cookie/Set-Cookie instead of treating them as opaque header strings.
• Pattern-based header matching — a header equivalent of matchJsonField, for headers like Idempotency-Key or traceparent that shouldn’t be matched exactly or ignored entirely.
• Ordered query string matching — QueryStringMatcher compares parameters as an unordered set and can be told which ones count (ignoreQueryParam(), matchOnlyQueryParams() — both built); what’s left is choosing order-sensitive comparison for an API where ?a=1&b=2 and ?b=2&a=1 are not the same request.
• Request assertions (expectRequest()) — a cassette that’s both a fixture and a verification that the code under test actually sent the expected data, not just that it got a response back.
• Deduplication via repeat count — one entry plus repeat: N instead of N identical interactions for N identical calls.
• Parallel recording to separate files, merged after the fact — an alternative to the session-wide lock, for teams that deliberately want to record in parallel.
• Provider-scoped redaction — redaction rules attached to a Provider (applied to interactions whose host matches) instead of only the flat, project-wide redact in Config. Coherent since providers became a core concept, but deliberately deferred: the common case is already covered by the default Authorization redaction, and the rest has a one-line workaround in a base test case.
• File-level cassette metadata (generator, source.test, source.provider) — to support tooling like list/info without parsing every interaction.

None of this is committed to a milestone — it’s tracked here so it isn’t lost, not because it’s coming soon.