Thanks for taking the time to contribute! 😄
Once you learn how to use Cypress, you can contribute in many ways:
- Join the Cypress Gitter chat and answer questions. Teaching others how to use Cypress is a great way to learn more about how it works.
- Blog about Cypress. We display blogs featuring Cypress on our Examples page. If you'd like your blog featured, contact us.
- Write some documentation or improve our existing docs. Know another language? You can help us translate them. See our guide to contributing to our docs.
- Give a talk about Cypress. Contact us ahead of time and we'll send you some swag. 👕
Want to dive deeper into how Cypress works? There are several ways you can help with the development of Cypress:
- Report bugs by opening an issue.
- Request features by opening an issue.
- Write Code for one of our core packages. Please thoroughly read our writing code guide.
- CI Status
- Code of Conduct
- Contributing Bug Reports & Feature Requests
- Writing Code
- Writing Documentation
- Committing Code
- Deployment
All contributors are expecting to abide by our Code of Conduct.
This article describes how to open an effective bug report so we can get your issue fixed or help you work around it.
The most important things to do are:
- Search existing issues for your problem
- Check the list of common fixes below
- Make sure we support your setup
- Gather debugging information
- Explain how to reproduce the issue
If you have a feature request (not a bug), see Feature Requests.
Before filing a bug, make sure you are up to date. Your issue may have already been fixed. Even if you do not see the issue described as resolved in a newer version, a newer version may help in the process of debugging your issue by giving more helpful error messages.
See our document on installing cypress
Before filing a bug, make sure you're filing an issue against something we support. See our System Requirements.
For some issues, there are places you can check for more information. This may help you resolve the issue yourself. Even if it doesn't, this information can help us figure out and resolve an issue.
- For issues in the web browser, check the JavaScript console and your Network tab in your DevTools
- Click on any command in the Command Log where the failure occurred, this will log more information about the error to the JavaScript console.
- Use Cypress'
debug
orpause
commands to step through your commands. - Ask other Cypress users for help in our gitter channel.
The most important part of your issue is instructions on how to reproduce the issue.
- What did you do?
- If you do it again, does it still break?
- Does it depend on a specific order?
It is nearly impossible for us to resolve many issues if we can not reproduce them. Your best chance of getting a bug looked at quickly is to provide a repository with a reproducible bug that can be cloned and run.
If you're up to date, supported, have collected information about the problem, and have the best reproduction instructions you can come up with, you're ready to open an issue.
Have a feature you'd like to see in Cypress? This describes how to file an effective feature request.
The most important things to do are:
- Understand our roadmap
- Make sure your feature makes sense in the project
- Align your expectations around timelines and priorities
- Describe your problem, not your solution
We have a cohesive vision for Cypress in the long term and a general roadmap that extends into the future. While the specifics of how we get there are flexible, many milestones are well-established.
Feature requests are an important part of what we plan in our roadmap, but we ultimately build only features which make sense as part of the long term plan.
We have a lot of users and a small team. Even if your feature is something we're interested in and a good fit for where we want the product to go, it may take us a long time to get around to building it.
If you want a concrete timeline, you can contact us to pay for some control over our roadmap.
When you file a feature request, we need you to describe the problem you're facing first, not just your desired solution.
Often, your problem may have a lot in common with other similar problems. If we understand your use case we can compare it to other use cases and sometimes find a more powerful or more general solution which solves several problems at once. Understanding the root issue can let us merge and contextualize things. Sometimes there's already a way to solve your problem that might just not be obvious.
Also, your proposed solution may not be compatible with the direction we want to take the product, but we may be able to come up with another solution which has approximately the same effect and does fit into the product direction.
If you think your feature might be a good fit for our roadmap, has reasonable expectations about it, and has a good description of the problem you're trying to solve, you're ready to open a feature request.
Working on your first Pull Request? You can learn how from this free series How to Contribute to an Open Source Project on GitHub
Cypress is a large open source project. When you want to contribute to Cypress, you may be unsure which part of the project to work within.
This repository is made up of various packages. They are discrete modules with different responsibilities, but each is necessary for the Cypress app and is not necessarily useful outside of the Cypress app.
Here is a list of the core packages in this repository with a short description, located within the packages
directory:
Folder Name | Purpose |
---|---|
coffee | A centralized version of CoffeeScript used for other packages. |
desktop-gui | The front-end code for the Cypress Desktop GUI. |
driver | The code that is used to drive the behavior of the API commands. |
electron | The Cypress implementation of Electron. |
example | Our example kitchen-sink application. |
extension | The Cypress Chrome browser extension |
https-proxy | This does https proxy for handling http certs and traffic. |
launcher | Finds and launches browsers installed on your system. |
reporter | The reporter shows the running results of the tests (The Command Log UI). |
root | Dummy package pointing at the root of the repository. |
runner | The runner is the minimal "chrome" around the user's application under test. |
server | The <3 of Cypress. This orchestrates everything. The entire backend. |
socket | A wrapper around socket.io to provide common libraries. |
static | Serves static assets used in the Cypress GUI. |
ts | A centralized version of typescript. |
We try to tag all issues with a pkg/
tag describing the appropriate package the work is required in. For example, the pkg/driver
label is tagged on issues that require work in the driver
package.
You must have node
and npm
installed to run the project. We use avn, a utility to switch to the right npm version, in each folder. Currently, Cypress should be developed using the version specified in root .node-version file.
Install all dependencies:
npm install
This will install this repo's direct dependencies as well as the dependencies for every individual package.
Then, build all the packages and start the app:
npm run build
npm start
If there are errors building the packages, run with DEBUG=cypress:*
option to see more details.
This outputs a lot of debugging lines. To focus on an individual module run with DEBUG=cypress:launcher
for instance.
Each package is responsible for building itself and testing itself and can do so using whatever tools are appropriate, but each conforms to a standard set of npm scripts so that building, watching, testing, etc. can be orchestrated from the root of this repo. Here are the npm scripts supported and what they mean:
Task | Purpose |
---|---|
build |
Build the package |
build-prod |
Build all assets for production (if makes sense) |
start |
Run a server for serving files |
clean |
Remove any assets created by build-dev or build-prod |
clean-deps |
Remove any dependencies installed (usually by npm ) |
test |
Runs all tests once |
test-watch |
Run all tests in watch mode |
watch |
Watch source files and build development assets when they are saved. This may also run a server for serving files and run tests related to a saved file. |
Not every package requires or makes use of every script, so it is simply omitted from that package's package.json
and not run.
You can run npm run all <script name>
from the root directory to run a script in every package that utilizes that script. Many times, you may only be working on one or two packages at a time, so it won't be necessary or desirable to run a script for every package. You can use the --packages
option to specify in which package(s) to run the script.
You can even run npm run all install
to install all npm dependencies for each package. Note that this is already done automatically for you when you run npm install
.
npm run all watch-dev -- --packages core-desktop-gui
Separate the package names with commas to specify multiple packages:
npm run all watch-dev -- --packages core-desktop-gui,core-runner
By default, all tasks run in parallel. This is faster than running serially, but the output ends up mixed together and, if things go wrong, it can be difficult see where the error occurred. To run tasks serially, use the --serial
flag:
npm run all build-prod -- --serial
build-prod will be run sequentially for every package, so the output for each package won't be jumbled with the output of the others.
It is not recommended to use --serial
with any script that is long-running, like watch-dev or test, since they need to be parallel.
Some packages use debug to
log debug messages to the console. The naming scheme should be
cypress:<package name>
. For example to see launcher messages during unit
tests start it using
cd packages/launcher
DEBUG=cypress:launcher npm test
If you want to see log messages from all Cypress projects use wild card
DEBUG=cypress:*
Or for an individual package:
DEBUG=cypress:cli
DEBUG=cypress:server
DEBUG=cypress:launcher
We use eslint to lint all JavaScript code and follow rules specified in eslint-plugin-cypress-dev plugin.
For most packages, there are unit, integration and e2e tests, which can be triggered by npm run test-unit
, npm run test-integration
and npm run test-e2e
respectively.
Our true e2e tests are in packages/server
, which test the full stack all together.
The best source of truth in figuring out how to run tests for each package is our circle.yml
file found in the root cypress
directory. The tasks defined in our circle.yml
are all run before anything is deployed.
Since it is generally best to do single runs of tests serially instead of in parallel, this repo has some convenience scripts to run all the tests for all the packages sequentially:
npm run test ## same as 'npm run all test -- --serial'
npm run test-unit ## same as 'npm run all test-unit -- --serial'
npm run test-integration ## same as 'npm run all test-integration -- --serial'
npm run test-e2e ## same as 'npm run all test-e2e -- --serial'
Sometimes tests pass locally, but fail on CI. Our CI environment should be
dockerized. In order to run the same image locally, there is script
scripts/run-docker-local.sh that assumes that you
have pulled the image cypress/internal:chrome61
(see
circle.yml for the current image name).
The image will start and will map the root of the repository to
/cypress
inside the image. Now you can modify the files using your
favorite environment and rerun tests inside the docker environment.
hint sometimes building inside the image has problems with node-sass
library
Error: Missing binding /cypress/packages/desktop-gui/node_modules/node-sass/vendor/linux-x64-48/binding.node
Node Sass could not find a binding for your current environment: Linux 64-bit with Node.js 6.x
Found bindings for the following environments:
- OS X 64-bit with Node.js 6.x
This usually happens because your environment has changed since running `npm install`.
Run `npm rebuild node-sass` to build the binding for your current environment.
From the running container, go into that project and rebuild node-sass
$ npm run docker
cd packages/desktop-gui
npm rebuild node-sass
Currently, if you want to work on the code around logging in, viewing runs, and setting up new projects to record, this requires connecting to a locally running API server.
Our API server is only accessible to cypress employees at the moment. If you want to work with the code, we recommend working within the Cypress tests for the Desktop-Gui. There are lots of tests mocking our API server around logging in, seeing runs, and setting up projects.
It should be noted that for developing in the driver
, you need to watch the files using one of the following methods:
- In the
cypress
root directory runnpm run watch
: This will run the watch task for all packages that have one. - In the
cypress/packages/runner
directory runnpm run watch
: This will run the watch task for the runner, which bundles the driver.
- In the
cypress
root directory, runnpm install
&npm start
. - When the Cypress Test Runner opens, manually add the directory
cypress/packages/driver/test
. - In the
cypress/packages/driver
directory, runnpm start
. - Click into the
test
directory from the Cypress Test Runner. - Select any test file you want to run.
- In the
cypress
directory: runnpm install
. - In the
cypress/packages/driver
directory, runnpm start
&npm run test-integration
. - The Cypress Test Runner should spawn and run through each test file individually.
Cypress documentation lives in separate repository with its own dependencies and build tools. See Documentation Contributing Guideline.
The repository is setup with two main (protected) branches.
master
is the code already published in the last Cypress versiondevelop
is the current latest "edge" code. This branch is set as the default branch, and all pull requests should be made against this branch.
- When opening a PR for a specific issue already open, please name the branch you are working on using convention
issue-[issue number]
. For example, if your PR fixes Issue #803, name your branchissue-803
. - Please use the
address #[issue number]
orcloses #[issue number]
syntax in the pull request description. - Please check the "Allow edits from maintainers" checkbox when submitting your PR. This will make it easier for the maintainers to make minor adjustments, to help with tests or any other changes we may need.
This repository is exhaustively tested by CircleCI. Additionally we test the code by running it against various other example projects. See CI badges and links at the top of this document.
We will try to review and merge pull requests quickly. After merging we will try releasing a new version. If you want to know our build process or build your own Cypress binary, read DEPLOY.md