Cypress Blog

Sharing our challenges, mistakes, hacks, successes, opinions and news.

Using Nrwl Nx to Add Cypress to Your Angular Development Workflow

01-17-2019

Benjamin Cabanes

This is a guest post from Benjamin Cabanes, an Angular Engineer at the Angular consulting firm Nrwl (Narwhal Technologies Inc.) in Toronto. As an active contributor to Nrwl’s Nx open source project, Ben also works with Nrwl’s American enterprise clients in the Telecom and Financial Services space. Ben regularly blogs about best practices when building Angular applications at scale.

Happy 2019 from Cypress!

01-09-2019

The Cypress Team

As our team gets a running start to the new year, we think reflecting on how far Cypress.io has come in 2018 serves as the perfect conduit to determining our goals for 2019. We reached some truly unprecedented achievements, and we could not have done it without our outstanding Cypress community. Below are some of the highlights of 2018, as well as what we plan to accomplish in the year ahead.

Stop using Page Objects and Start using App Actions

01-03-2019

Gleb Bahmutov

Writing maintainable end-to-end tests is challenging. Often testers create another layer of indirection on top of the web page called page objects to execute common actions. In this post I argue that page objects are a bad practice, and suggest dispatching actions directly to the application’s internal logic. This works great with a modern Cypress.io test runner that runs the test code directly alongside the application’s code.

Element Coverage

12-20-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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.

Devoxx Belgium 2018 & Xebia Meetup

12-12-2018

Amir Rustamzadeh

November was another great month here at Cypress as the team spread out across multiple conferences to talk about end-to-end testing. I had the pleasure of giving a conference talk and a workshop at Devoxx Belgium. In between the hustle and bustle of Devoxx, I made a visit to the Xebia headquarters for a Cypress meetup.

Meet our Lead Product Designer: Jeff Tucker

11-29-2018

Jeff Tucker

Hi, I’m Jeff 👋 I’m a designer and developer, and I’ve just joined Cypress as Lead Product Designer. I’ve held a fairly wide assortment of roles before this – UX designer, frontend developer, backend developer, and data analyst. Let’s take a look at how I’m using these skills to help build Cypress.

Testing Redux Store

11-14-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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 store.

ReactiveConf 2018

11-08-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

October 2018 was a great month for Cypress - we went out of Beta with our SaaS services, did a ton of work on the test runner and released v3.1.1, and I did ReactiveConf Roadshow and Conference tour. This blog post summarizes what I have done during the conference. If you could not attend the ReactiveConf 2018, you can still catch up with Cypress by reading.

Cypress Case Study: Quizlet

10-17-2018

Magnolia Triplett

With more than 30 million active users every month, Quizlet is now the world’s largest student and teacher online learning community. It’s used by one in two high school students and one in three college students, so keeping their application up and running smoothly is a top priority. In this case study, we’ll dig into why and how Quizlet now trusts Cypress as their primary end-to-end testing framework.

Cypress Halloween Theme

10-11-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

A good tool can become a great tool when users make it their own through customization. In this blog post I will explain how to customize the Cypress test runner’s appearance through user space color themes. Since it is the season, we have prepared a dark and spooky Halloween color theme that might scare all your bugs away!

A New Leaf at Cypress: Lila Conlee Joins the Team

10-04-2018

Lila Conlee

Writing software is hard! Whether you’re building an application from scratch or making modifications to the oldest file in a codebase, the process wears on you. Some of the difficulties are fun; you get to fail repeatedly, fix most of your mistakes, and create something amazing all while becoming more experienced and knowledgeable.

Dashboard Service Downtime Post-mortem on September 24th, 2018

09-27-2018

Amir Rustamzadeh

On Monday, September 24th, the Cypress Dashboard service experienced an approximate downtime of 4 hours from 18:20 UTC to 22:40 UTC. This post is to document and communicate to our users the events that occurred, our investigation, solutions, and the actions we’re taking immediately to mitigate and improve our response to service downtime scenarios.

We're officially out of beta!

09-20-2018

Brian Mann

It’s been over four years since our first commit. Since then, we’ve seen Cypress achieve widespread and rapidly growing adoption. It’s now been downloaded more than 2.5 million times, with thousands of organizations recording millions of tests per month. And today, we’re thrilled to announce that Cypress has officially left beta. 🎉

Run Your End-to-end Tests 10 Times Faster with Automatic Test Parallelization

09-05-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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 solution that slashes those waiting periods - it is automatic test file load balancing across multiple CI machines using a single --parallel flag.

Setting up Bitbucket Pipelines with proper caching of NPM and Cypress

08-30-2018

Ondřej Janošík

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.

Record Test Artifacts from any Docker CI

08-28-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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 Service particularly useful in collecting and showing all of your test artifacts in a single place.

Takeaways from Write the Docs + Open Help Cincinnati

08-22-2018

Jennifer Shehane

This weekend I attended Write the Docs + Open Help Cincinnati. Write the Docs + Open Help is an event that brings together documentation contributors to share and learn from one another. The weekend included a day of talks and day of unconference sessions and lightning talks. It also included three days of documentation sprints led by Open Help, which I was unable to attend.

Fast Tests, Tiny Docker Image

08-08-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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. Just run npm ci and cypress run and you are good to go.

JSON Schemas are your True Testing Friend

07-10-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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.

$4 million more means more features and jobs

06-26-2018

Drew Lanham

It’s a big day for Cypress. We are going to take a brief break from our scheduled programming to announce that Cypress has raised $4 million, co-led by Las Olas Venture Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners.

Introducing Drew Lanham

06-22-2018

Brian Mann

When is the right time to bring in a CEO? This “Founder’s Dilemma” is something I’ve been considering for some time. After leading product development for Cypress and steering the company through two rounds of funding, eventually I realized trying to split my time between CEO and development duties was no longer feasible. Being merely an “adequate” CEO hampered our potential and my passion and vision has always belonged with building the product. I realized we’d reached the point where we needed a dedicated CEO.

Sliding Down the Testing Pyramid

04-02-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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 components written using other frameworks like Vue, React, Cycle, Svelte and others.

Angular + Cypress = Love

03-20-2018

Jeff Whelpley

This is a guest post from Jeff Whelpley, CTO at Swish, Google Developer Expert, co-creator of Angular Universal (server rendering for Angular 2+), co-organizer of Boston Angular Meetup, co-organizer of Boston AI Meetup, guest/panelist on AngularAir and Adventures in Angular podcasts, and frequent speaker at local Boston meetups.

Cypress is heading to Assert(js)

02-13-2018

Lance Weatherby

The Cypress team is super excited to be heading to San Antonio on February 22 for the Assert(js) conference. The Assert(js) Testing Conference is a one-day, single-track conference focused on helping JavaScript developers better understand and share best practices with JavaScript testing tools. Sounds like a great place for us to hang out with like minded developers.

When Can The Test Start?

02-05-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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.

End-to-End Snapshot Testing

01-16-2018

Gleb Bahmutov

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.

An Alternative to Protractor for Angular Projects

12-11-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

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)!

Testing apps hosted on Codepen.io

12-05-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

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.

Testing Vue web applications with Vuex data store & REST backend

11-28-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

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.

Extending Cypress With Plugins

11-21-2017

Brian Mann

One of the greatest (and unique) advantages of Cypress is that all of your test code runs in the browser. This provides us a significant architectural advantage over every other testing tool out there.

Control an AngularJS Application From E2E Tests

11-15-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

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 application such as http://todomvc.com/examples/angularjs/; how could you take advantage of this?

Add GUI to your E2E API tests

11-07-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

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, should be really good at working with a remote server API via HTTP. After all, this is what every useful website does. Every website exchanges data with remote servers through HTTP requests.

Conditional testing and control flow in Cypress

10-30-2017

Brian Mann

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.

Joining Cypress

10-24-2017

Andrew Van Slaars

As a developer, I am always on the lookout for tools and practices that will improve my productivity, help me write higher quality software and increase the enjoyment I get out of my work. When I had the opportunity to use Cypress for the first time, it immediately checked off all 3 boxes for me.

Cypress is now public beta

10-10-2017

Brian Mann

The first commit on Cypress happened on June 5th, 2014 - exactly 3 years, 4 months, and 5 days ago.

Good error messages

07-26-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

If I can paraphrase a cliché:

10 ways we improved our docs

07-05-2017

Jennifer Shehane

As part of our strategy towards going open source, we wanted to make several improvements to our documentation.

Immutable deploys and Cypress

05-30-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

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 that you can point production DNS record at the new deployment and it will work.

Why I joined the Cypress.io team

05-15-2017

Gleb Bahmutov

You know what is hard? Changing jobs is hard. Testing web applications is hard. Luckily for me, I have an opportunity to tackle both problems at once!

Atom test utils

05-05-2017

Chris Breiding

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 during development. The more tests there are, the longer it takes to run them all, which can slow things down.

Cypress is going open source!

05-04-2017

Brian Mann

That’s right! After years of development and focused iteration with our early adopters, the most advanced front-end testing tool in the universe is almost ready for its ultimate adventure: going open source!