Cypress Utilities, APIs, and Troubleshooting

TroubleShooting from the terminal

Cypress also has a command-line tool that allows us to run Cypress from a terminal or from a command line in a continuous integration tool. In our environment, we start that tool with rake cypress:run. Doing so will run the tests against the Electron JS run time by default.

When we run this command, we’ll get output directly in our terminal. We’ll get a line for each individual test with a time amount, for example, “✓ marks a group of tickets sold on click 487ms”. We’ll also get a summary table for each file, and a final summary table that gives the time and the test count for each file.

We’ll also get files in tmp/cypress_videos, one for each test file, that shows a video capture of the browser for each test in the file. A failing test adds a screenshot of the failure into the folder tmp/cypress_screenshots.

This command is usually going to be run on a continuous integration server. In actual development, we may want the interactive test runner and access to the browser tools.

Troubleshooting

Sometimes things just don’t work the way you expect, either when testing your code in Cypress or when just running it in the browser. Browsers have many different tools to determine what is happening when things don’t work as expected. We’ll take a look at those tools first, then look at debugging Cypress tests in the Cypress test runner. We’ll end by taking a quick peek at a browser extension to troubleshoot ...