Cypress – End to End Testing Framework

What is Cypress?

Cypress is an end to end testing framework which is gaining popularity amongst test community. Cypress is open source and its community is very active. Cypress tests are written in JavaScript but majority of the time automation scripts can be written using cypress commands which are pretty intuitive to work with.

Cypress enables you to write all types of tests :

• Unit Testing
• Integration Testing
• End-to-End Testing

Cypress is most often compared to Selenium; however Cypress is both fundamentally and architecturally different. Cypress is not constrained by the same restrictions as Selenium. This enables you to write faster, easier and more reliable tests.

Some outstanding features of Cypress are :

• Screenshots and videos : View screenshots taken automatically on failure, or videos of your entire test suite when run from the CLI.
• Automatic waiting : Never add waits or sleeps to your tests. Cypress automatically waits for commands and assertions before moving on. No more async hell.
• Easy to debug :  Debug directly from familiar tools like Developer Tools. Cypress readable errors and stack traces make debugging lightning fast.
• Consistent results : Cypress architecture doesn’t use Selenium or WebDriver. Tests are fast, consistent and reliable that are flake-free.
• Time travel : Cypress takes snapshots as your tests run. Hover over commands in the Command Log to see exactly what happened at each step.
• Cross browser testing : Run tests within Firefox and Chrome-family browsers (including Edge and Electron) locally and optimally in a Continuous Integration pipeline.

Install IDE

Visual Studio Code is the preferred IDE for Cypress projects.

You can download Visual Studio Code from here: https://code.visualstudio.com/download

Install Node.js

We need to install Node.js because we need to use npm and npx which get downloaded along with node.js.

You can download node.js from here: https://nodejs.org/en/download/

Once download is complete, launch and run through the installer. To verify successful installation check the version:

Cypress Installation

There are no servers, drivers, or any other dependencies to install or configure.

Cypress is all in one.
Cypress installs all of this in a single command.

Just a single command :

To install Cypress desktop app and Cypress CLI.

Cypress desktop app is GUI that can be used to run the test in browser. Cypress CLI helps you run cypress tests headlessly.

Launch Cypress

To launchCypress desktop app (GUI)

The .js files under examples folder are sample cypress tests downloaded to give you a quick  start in the world of Cypress.

In the next article, we will learn about Cypress commands and accessing UI elements.