Cypress Blog

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

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!