Cypress hangs on verify step

Current behavior:

Cypress keeps “Verifying Cypress can run”, so the program hangs

Desired behavior:

Cypress to run normally

How to reproduce:

npm install cypress mocha mocha-multi-reporters mocha-junit-reporter
node_modules/cypress/bin/cypress verify

Additional Info (images, stack traces, etc)

No, are there log files somewhere?

Cypress team update

If you hit problems running Cypress on a specific system:

• try using newer Cypress version

• try using newer CI version, or a different CI. See our examples for different CI systems that we run already in cypress-example-kitchensink for examples of systems that work very well

• try using our official images from cypress-io/cypress-docker-images

• run Cypress with debug log output. In particular, we would like to see debug output from the CLI module and from our XVFB module. You can turn them both using DEBUG=cypress:cli,xvfb npx cypress verify

• provide an example for us to reproduce, and please remember that it will be hard for us to install an entire system that matches your system unless you provide Docker file

• Operating System: CentOS 7.4

• Cypress Version: 1.0.2

• Browser Version: N/A

[linuxdropout]

Same issue

Windows 10 WSL - Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS (Bionic Beaver) Cypress - ^3.1.5

Steps: npm i node node_modules/cypress/bin/cypress open

Result: never finishes ‘Verifying cypress can run’

[stuartsan]

I ran into this same problem of Cypress hanging on the verify step.

The call to util.exec is where I observed it hanging:

https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/blob/2333d04a54acfd2d89d9d53cc60a49d46228ceef/cli/lib/tasks/verify.js#L68-L71

If I change that first line to:

return Promise.resolve(util.exec(cypressExecPath, args, { stdio: 'inherit' })) 

So that the child process dumps its stdout and stderr to those of the parent process, it still hangs but I get an informative error message:

A JavaScript error occurred in the main process
Uncaught Exception:
Error: Failed to get 'appData' path
    at Object.<anonymous> (/tmp/lib/resources/electron.asar/browser/init.js:149:39)
    at Object.<anonymous> (/tmp/lib/resources/electron.asar/browser/init.js:173:3)
    at Module._compile (module.js:569:30)
    at Object.Module._extensions..js (module.js:580:10)
    at Module.load (module.js:503:32)
    at tryModuleLoad (module.js:466:12)
    at Function.Module._load (module.js:458:3)
    at Function.Module.runMain (module.js:605:10)
    at startup (bootstrap_node.js:167:16)
    at bootstrap_node.js:589:3

Which I was able to use to trace back to the problem (same as @derkoe 's – electron’s default appData path was a read-only directory).

Y’all open to a PR to add this? Doesn’t address the underlying issue of why cypress --smoke-test seems to be not exiting when this kind of failure happens, but it at least adds visibility so folks can self-serve and fix their specific problem more easily.

EDIT would need to adjust things a little so the then and catch callbacks don’t blow up with the difference when the smoke test does exit – more like “y’all open to something along these lines”