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How to run end to end (Cypress) tests

Cypress tests run using the client-side code. This guide shows you how to run the Cypress test suite either as Docker container, as a command-line tool locally, or using the Cypress UI. When running within these tests, make sure you build the client locally in order to ensure that the latest client code is what Cypress is testing against.

make client_build

After completing the previous command, you should be able to run the commands before and utilize the same client-side code to test. If you make any changes within the src/ directory, you will need to rebuild the client-side code. The same is not true for the back-end work as that work is reloaded every time the Cypress tests are started.

Using the Cypress UI​

The fastest way to run end to end tests is with the following command, which will open the Cypress UI, from which you can choose to run all integration specs (there should be a link in the top right that says something like "Run 25 integration specs"), or click on individual ones.

make e2e_test

This command truncates most tables in the test DB (which is much faster than destroying it, running it again, and running all the migrations), then populates the DB from the data in the /pkg/testdatagen/scenario/e2ebasic.go script, and then launches Cypress UI.

Sometimes, a new recently-merged migration might prevent the script from running. In that case, or if something else seems wrong with the test DB, you can set everything up from scratch:

make e2e_test_fresh

If you have already run tests in the current database, and you want to keep Cypress open to run the tests again, you can empty and refill the test DB with this command:

make db_e2e_up

In Docker​

If you instead would like to run all the tests in the terminal, use the following command:

make e2e_test_docker

To run just the office tests:

SPECS=cypress/integration/office/**/* make e2e_test_docker

Run Specific Tests in a File​

yarn cypress run --spec cypress/integration/path/to/file.jsx

Automated tests artifacts from continuous integration​

External documentation call-out

The intention of this documentation is to not repeat the official docs. At the time of this writing, the documentation being referenced contains an Artifacts overview section, which shows where Artifacts are stored in the CircleCI UI.

We use CircleCI to store artifacts for failed Cypress tests. These are available to all engineers with GitHub repository access in the CircleCI UI. Please see the official CirclCI documentation about build artifacts. The project's Artifacts are only stored on failed Integration Tests that run in CI. This is defined in our .circleci/config.yml file in the project under the e2e_tests_cypress: stanza. Here's a link to an example at the time of this writing.