Run Cypress Headless Without Binary

[arahansen]

Current behavior:

npm install cypress downloads the cypress app binary

Desired behavior:

npm install cypress (or something like npm install @cypress/headless) does not install a binary, and only installs necessary dependencies for running tests headlessly on CI.

Additional Info (images, stack traces, etc)

Our CI configuration is pretty strict about what can be externally downloaded. It would be great if cypress could be run without needing to whitelist the cypress domain.

• Operating System: Linux centos
• Cypress Version: 1.4.1
• Browser Version: Chrome 63

[brian-mann]

This is something we've internally talked a lot about and I have a lot of notes for. It is possible to do this - you wouldn't be able to run Electron, but you would be able to spawn an external browser.

The problem comes in where you have conflicting packages. You'd likely check in cypress already for local development and wouldn't want that to npm install in CI, and you also wouldn't want to check in a separate packaged like @cypress/headless.

For this to work I think we'd just need to set an env var like: CYPRESS_INSTALL_BINARY=0 which avoids installing the binary and the CLI would have to be upgraded to run in your node environment as opposed to always expecting the binary to exist. This would then run Cypress in your node environment (which is another can of worms) but it would work.

EDIT: another advantage of this is that if we supported Chrome headless (which we will), this avoids the need to orchestrate or have xvfb installed - since Electron would not need spawning locally. This creates a bit of combinatory explosion since it would require a lot of explaining and documentation, but that's another upside to this method.

[hehex9]

any progress ？

[lgandecki]

This would help putting cypress on aws lambda for amazingly quick parallel testing.

[surf66]

@lgandecki been trying to get Cypress working on AWS Lambda for a day only to come across this GitHub issue!

Anyone got an update?

[lsnape]

Also keen to run Cypress tests on AWS Lambda, although I don't see how installing the binary precludes the tests from running?

[lgandecki]

I don't fully remember. I think the "headful" chrome makes it so the whole thing doesn't fit in the lambda limit of 50 mb? So you have to download and install chrome which makes it slow and expensive (long running?)

[lsnape]

FWIW you can skirt around the 50mb limit by uploading the Lambda package as a zip to S3 first: https://hackernoon.com/exploring-the-aws-lambda-deployment-limits-9a8384b0bec3

If that is the issue then my feeling is 250mb should be enough? But if it takes a while to boot up then yeah that is an issue.

[StevenACoffman]

We are using puppeteer inside an AWS lambda and would like an equivalent cypress setup if someone has worked this out.

[JesterXL]

I tried to manually do this, but your Linux Cypress package is around 499 megs and the AWS Lambda S3 limit is 250 megs. I'd prefer to use Cypress vs. Puppeteer for Lambda, is there a way to get a smaller Linux binary?

[JesterXL]

I put the Linux version on S3, then copied and unzipped in the Lambda. It ran out of RAM. So I pumped the Lambda's RAM up to 3008 megs. It used 1908, but then ran out of hard drive space on the EC2 (Raspberry PI?) used for the Lambda. I TRIED lol