Sharing our challenges, mistakes, hacks, successes, opinions and news
In a world where time equates to money, minimizing execution time for various actions is imperative. This holds true for testing, where parallelizing test cases becomes a key strategy to reduce testing durations and accelerate test suite execution. Cypress Cloud, in conjunction with GitHub Actions,
Embarking on a project migration to a new tool may seem like a daunting journey, especially when adapting to Cypress requires mastering JavaScript and understanding the mocha framework. However, the silver lining lies in Cypress Studio, an integrated tool within Cypress. This visual gem simplifies t
This is a guest post from Ambassador David Ingraham. Hello, I’m David. I’m a Senior SDET with a passion for quality and training engineers on best practices in the industry. I’ve implemented robust testing frameworks for three years with Cypress.io and I’m looking forward to many more. Find and conn
Cypress has a built-in way for you to select files in an HTML5 input element and simulate dragging files into the browser with the introduction of the .selectFile() command. HTML5 input file upload With the .selectFile() command, you can easily select a fixture file in a form element: cy.get('input[
This blog post will teach you how to visually verify the emails sent by a 3rd party service. Such verification is necessary to ensure the emails have the expected style, and include the necessary information. The post teaches you how to deal with the difficult email markup generated from dynamic tem
Imagine you are sending beautiful HTML emails using your own SMTP server or even a 3rd party service like SendGrid. What if the emails are formatted incorrectly? What if the template string is incorrect and the user sees Dear <<undefined>>? Can you test the emails to make sure they really work? In t
When building a design system, we like to see components rendered in isolation. What better tool to do that than Storybook? We can see our components, wrap them in decorators, and show our stakeholders beautiful user story demos. Once we know how our components should look, we want to test them. For
In this blog post, we will use a local SMTP server to receive emails sent by the app to the user. We will test the HTML emails to make sure they look and work correctly. Note: you can find the source code shown in this blog post at cypress-email-example and watch a video explaining the testing proce
In this blog post we will deploy a static site to GitLab Pages, and then we will run end-to-end browser tests against the deployed site to make sure it is working as expected. The Cypress Test Runner makes it extremely simple to write full browser end-to-end (E2E) tests, while GitLab CI is a powerfu
In this post, NeuraLegion’s VP Oliver Moradov explains how you can use Cypress, NeuraLegion’s HAR Generator, and NexPloit together to automate AppSec testing in your pipelines. NeuraLegion delivers a developer and QA focused AI-powered Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) SaaS platform. With
Getting Start with Cypress Component Testing (Vue 2/3) As of Cypress 7.0, our new Cypress Component Test Runner is bundled with the Cypress Test Runner! It builds on the learnings from the original component testing implementation, which was hidden behind the experimentalComponentTesting flag. In th
As of Cypress 7.0, the new Component Test Runner is now bundled with Cypress! It builds on our learnings from the original component testing implementation, which was hidden behind the experimentalComponentTesting flag. In this blog post we will see how to set up the Cypress Component Test Runner in
Recently, we introduced a trial feature called experimentalRunEvents that simplifies running Node code before or after executing a spec file. Inside your plugin file you can add event hooks to perform operations that need OS access. For example, you could: initialize the database before all tests st
This blog post shows how to increase the resolution of the videos and screenshots recorded during the cypress run execution. Videos with higher resolution make debugging simpler and look better when shared with other members of the team. The problem Let's look at the Wikipedia.com website. In my loc
Let's take a page where a loading element is displayed while the application is fetching the data from the server. If the test is observing the loading element to make sure it disappears, can the loading be too fast? Can the test runner "blink" and miss the element? Yes, it can. In this blog post I
⚠️ This post is about running Cypress 10.1.x and below on Apple M1 ARM Architecture. Cypress 10.2.0 onwards includes native Apple Silicon support and does not require Rosetta to function. We recommend upgrading Cypress instead of following this guide for an older version. Native M1 builds run up to
Once upon a time Zach Bloomquist and I were discussing how to achieve an all-time hero status. We were talking about our open source heroes of course, and I wanted to send Zach a link to the testing section of the Develop, Preview, Test blog post written by Guillermo Rauch. The testing section was i
No one likes flaky tests, not even their mama. In this blog post I will show a test that appears simple, yet acts in surprisingly annoying and frustrating ways. We will slightly change the test to make it reliable and flake-free. We will apply the following three principles to the test refactoring t
This recipe shows how to verify that an Ag-Grid table is sorted correctly. The source code can be found in the cypress-example-recipes repository under the "Testing the DOM" list. The application itself is a single HTML file Ag-Grid Basic Example Ag-Grid Table The main.js file creates a "smart" ta
When the Cypress Test Runner runs through the test's steps, the application can update itself, causing problems. Often a very frustrating problem our users encounter simply says cy... failed because the element has been detached from the DOM. You can see this error below and its explanation using th
What is Ionic? Ionic Framework is a free, open-source framework for developing native mobile applications using web development frameworks like Angular, React, and (coming soon!) Vue. Mobile applications developed in Ionic Framework run in a browser during development. Because of this, we can use Cy
Let's take an application that makes an Ajax call to the browser to load a list of ... fruits. You can find this awesome and healthy application in Cypress Example Recipes under name "Stubbing window.fetch". Application Every time you visit an application you get five new fruits This application pre
Recently, we released the Cypress Real World App - a modern web application with a full set of E2E and API tests showing the recommended best practices for writing tests. From the start, we had Linux continuous integration running tests on every commit. After the release, we added a Windows continuo
Many tools allow one config file to extend another one. For example, ESLint allows one to apply recommended settings and then add several more rules: { "plugins": [ "react" ], "extends": [ "eslint:recommended", "plugin:react/recommended" ], "rules": { "react/no-set-state": "off" } } Similarly, the
No one likes slow tests. But before we can make a test faster, we need to understand where the test actually spends its time. In this blog post I will show how to report the total test duration and time per individual Cypress command. Note: you can find the test source code shown in this blog post i
Note: This post was originally published by Filip Hric on Medium. Filip is a QA lead at Slido, a lifelong IT enthusiast with a background in psychology, and a Cypress ambassador. TL;DR you can test your lists using .then() or .each() Cypress retries can help you test changes in your app you can pass
Imagine a large project with hundreds of Cypress spec files. If you work on just one feature and open a pull request with small code changes and corresponding updates to 1 Cypress spec file, it makes sense to try running that changed spec file first. Chances are high that any new issues will be intr
André Elmoznino Laufer is software developer at Valtech, currently consulting at the national Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company and also volunteering as a coding teacher for kids at CoderDojo. For the past year I’ve been working at UR (the national Swedish Educational Broadcasting Company), h
In this blog post, I will show how to receive individual test results as soon as each test is finished, without waiting for the entire run to finish. A single Cypress test might be fast, but if you wait for an entire large test run to finish, you might as well watch the paint dry. What if the first
Netlify became a popular Continuous Delivery (CD) and hosting solution for a lot of organizations due to its simplicity and power. Pick your repository, click "Deploy site" ... and the site magically appears. The example below shows me adding the cypress-io/netlify-plugin-cypress-example repository
This blog post shows how to control native HTML elements from Cypress tests. We will also look at how to work with a very popular wrapper library called Select2, that supplants the native elements with an additional HTML markup. Note: you can find the source code for this post in the recipe "Select
The App Let's take an application that has an element. When the user picks a new color, the application changes a CSS variable which controls the background color. In action, it looks like this: The application in action The HTML markup below has only the input color element. This is the body of th
Your application might be a layered cake of historical data. Often old records are missing pieces because at first the web application never asked for them, or never validated them. The current web application might be much stricter with its user inputs, never allowing incomplete data to be entered.
Cypress has a ... difficulty working with iframes. Mostly because all built-in cy DOM traversal commands do hard stop the moment they hit #document node inside the iframe. iframe when it sees a Cypress command (re-enactment) If your web application uses iframes, then working with elements in those i
How do you test native browser APIs like Notification? If you don't have a real modern browser during tests, it seems like a challenge. But Cypress controls an Electron or Chrome or (soon) Firefox browser, so your tests can access the real thing. This blog post shows typical tests for a tiny web app
Imagine a small web page application that shows a window Confirm popup when the user clicks a button. The HTML might look like this Assertion counting Click on the button, should show Window confirm dialog Click The application works. Window Confirm application We can write a test to confirm (pun
DevTools is invaluable for debugging an application, or understanding why an end-to-end test goes astray. During Cypress tests, you can click on any command to see additional information for that command, inspect DOM elements, and observe network calls. Many frameworks provide their own extensions t
The Cypress Test Runner can "see" everything happening inside the web application under test: DOM elements, cookies, local storage items, location, etc. The Test Runner can also spy on and stub network requests the application is making to its backend API or even to the 3rd party APIs. This blog pos
Recently, operating systems iOS13, Android 10, MacOS Catalina and Windows 10 have introduced Dark Mode support with most browsers supporting CSS prefers-color-scheme. On Mac, you can pick Light (default), Dark or Auto mode via System Preferences / General options. I believe the Apple UI designers ar
Let's say you cover your application with end-to-end tests. You achieve the elusive 100% code coverage using the Cypress code coverage plugin. Is this enough to guarantee a good user experience? Maybe, but I'm not so sure. Another question to consider is: as Cypress.io prepares to release its cross-
Setting up continuous integration server is ... no one's favorite activity. Copying and pasting config YAML or JSON files, pushing code, waiting for the server to reject your commit due to wrong indentation or a missing comma - it is a very frustrating experience, we get it. This is why we are so ex
JAM Stack has become a popular way to build websites - you can write your pages using Markdown (the M in JAM), build using JavaScript tools that fetch data from APIs and get mostly static sites that are very fast. In this blog post I will show how each Markdown page can also include its own end-to-e
Imagine a very long-running end-to-end test. For me, anything longer than 20 seconds seems like way too long of a test to effectively work with. When running on Continuous Integration server, a long test might even run out of memory, crashing the Test Runner. How can we split a longer test into a se
End-to-end tests can be extremely effective at covering a lot of your application's code. Even a single realistic test, because it loads and exercises the entire application, can cover 60-70% of the statements. Introduction Let's look at a concrete example in the cypress-example-todomvc-redux reposi
Note: At this time, Cypress is no longer supporting testing Electron.js applications, and are no longer publishing the binaries referenced in this post. Thank you for your interest, and check out our Roadmap for information on upcoming features from Cypress. Cypress is great for testing web applicat
Creating a new fully featured React application using Create React App v3 is as easy as two NPM commands $ npm i -g create-react-app + [email protected] $ create-react-app my-new-app Then switch to the new folder my-new-app and run npm start or yarn start - the application will be transpiled,
If you live on the bleeding edge of browser technology, you are probably excited about new standard modules that soon (might) come built-in to modern browsers. Built-in storage module There is a TC39 proposal to include a set of standard modules in each browser. The goal is to prevent the need to bu
Imagine a typical web application during end-to-end testing. The test runner (in this case Cypress.io) is driving the app via its DOM elements; it is clicking and typing and scrolling. The test runner checks if the application behaves correctly by explicitly executing assertions against the displaye
This blog post shows how to shrink untestable code and pushes it to the edges of the applications. The core of the web application will remain easy to check from our tests, while external effects can be observed or stubbed. The Cypress.io test runner has limitations. For example, when controlling th
This is a guest post from Michael Herman, a software engineer and educator who lives in the Denver area. He is the founder of TestDriven.io. Besides development, he enjoys building financial models, tech writing, hiking, and teaching. Cypress is a modern web automation test framework designed to sim
Recently a user opened a Cypress issue #3135 asking why the cy.click() command was behaving differently than the way click behaved when a user clicks on the button. We’ve seen many people ask similar questions involving click and wanted to address how to ensure your tests behave the same way as a us
Hello, reader. This article was an opinion piece about why app actions are better than page objects. The page object pattern is well known in the QA community, and widely and successfully used in the Cypress ecosystem. Writing maintainable end-to-end tests is challenging. Often testers create anothe
Our users are periodically asking us to instrument application code and save code coverage information after Cypress runs end-to-end tests. In this blog I will argue that code coverage is less than useful for end-to-end tests. Then I will show element coverage that might be a better metric. Experim
Cypress tests usually operate via public browser APIs like DOM, network, or storage. But the tests can just as easily reach into the application and check if the internal state is updated correctly. In this blog post I will show you how to run assertions against a React application that uses a Redux
I have no patience waiting for a lot of Cypress end-to-end tests to finish running on CI. Just sitting and waiting … staring at the CI badge. Any run taking longer than a minute feels like an eternity. Our Cypress development team felt this pain and decided to do something about it. Today we have a
This is a guest post from Ondřej Janošík, co-owner of Notum Technologies, full-stack developer and clean code enthusiast based in the Czech Republic. Bitbucket Pipelines & Deployments is integrated CI/CD for Bitbucket Cloud that’s trivial to set up, automating your code from test to production (at l
We worked hard to make sure the Cypress Test Runner could be compatible with every continuous integration system. Jenkins, Travis, Circle, Zeit Now, Google Cloud Build, or your own homegrown CI system - they should all work with zero or minimum effort. We also worked hard to make our Dashboard Servi
If the Cypress Test Runner were a person, its best friend would be a person named Docker. Really, Cypress and Docker work so well together! For example, all our CI builds are using cypress-docker-images to include all necessary dependencies in order to successfully install and run Cypress tests. Jus
We use JSON schemas to describe the data flowing through our system, document API routes, test server code and even validate fixtures used during end-to-end testing. This long(ish) blog post describes in detail how we did this. Introduction At Cypress we have 3 large pieces of software: The Cypres
A good end-to-end test runner, like Cypress, can be very effective at performing integration tests and even at running unit tests. In this blog post I will show how to write view component tests for a Hyperapp application and how to unit test individual functions. The same approach can work for comp
Can the test runner be too quick? Can the tests start before the application is ready to handle the test steps? It definitely can happen. This blog post shows a little trick one can use to detect when a web application really starts, so that the test runner never has to wait longer than necessary. A
Snapshot testing has taken the JavaScript unit testing world by storm. It removes much of the manual coding and much of the boilerplate, leaving the test runner to save or compare produced values. This blog post shows how the Cypress Test Runner can bring the same power to your end-to-end tests. Ex
Fans of Angular CLI get Protractor end-to-end tests generated with each scaffolded project. In this blog post I will show how to add Cypress E2E tests instead with minimum effort (and TypeScript support)! Scaffolding a project Scaffolding an Angular project using ng new is a huge time saver. Just 4
Lots of people love to quickly throw web applications on Codepen.io. Who can refuse a quick and powerful way to start writing code immediately; sharing results is almost instant. In this blog post I will show how to write end-to-end tests for web apps embedded in a Codepen. Warning: no longer workin
In this blog post we will test a typical web application that uses a central data store to manage state. The data store communicates with the backend that stores the data long term. You can find patterns in React + Redux applications, Angular + MobX and countless other combinations. This example loo
Cypress runs close to your application. Only a thin iframe separates the production code from the testing code. Thus Cypress can take shortcuts and control your application code directly, bypassing always going through the DOM. For example imagine you are developing an AngularJS 1.x TodoMVC applicat
We like to pretend there are two disjointed end-to-end test types: API and browser automation tests. And that the tools used are very different; the API tests are executed by a CLI test runner, while automation tests all fire up a browser. Yet, a good E2E automation test runner, in my opinion, shoul
Conditional testing refers to the common programming pattern where you perform one action, or a different one. It’s also known as control flow. Typically this is expressed as: If X, then Y, else Z. Many of our users come into our chat asking how they can do “conditional testing” in Cypress. The ques
If I can paraphrase a cliché: bad things happen to good programs Things go wrong, even in the most carefully coded and thoroughly tested applications. In my opinion, a sign of a good app is if it gives meaningful and useful error messages when things go wrong. At Cypress we spend a lot of time tryin
As part of our strategy towards going open source, we wanted to make several improvements to our documentation. There were a few problems we wanted to address: There was no clear explanation of why you would want to use Cypress. There were no clear “Getting Started” guides that introduced you to Cyp
It is simple to run Cypress both locally and on CI. And it is simple to point your tests to a different server. If you are using immutable deploys, Cypress can be the ultimate “health check”. If the tests pass locally, then on CI, and then at a newly deployed environment - the chances are very high
At Cypress, we love creating tools that make testing easier and more productive. We also write a lot of tests ourselves to both guide our development and help prevent regressions. While having a lot of tests is a great way to prevent regressions, it can get in the way of getting quick feedback durin
