cy.visit() occasionally loads blank page

Is this a Feature or Bug?

A bug (either in Cypress, the browser or in our App)

Current behaviour:

Browser occasionally loads an empty/blank page and starts testing against it - but can’t find the expected elements.

This can happen to any spec. Often specs afterwards will run fine again.

1. Cypress navigates to / but the website shows as a blank page in the recorded video/screenshots
2. Test gets an authentication token and reloads the website with the token configured
3. Page still blank, cypress tests against the empty page and can’t find the expected elements, e.g. CypressError: Timed out retrying: Expected to find element: 'input[name=password]', but never found it.

The code for the tests is roughly the following:

// test*.ts
beforeEach(() => {
  cy.visit(`/`); // not logged in
  // get auth token via API, set it on local storage and visit site again
  cy.visit(`/`); // logged in
  cy.get('#root'); // fails
});

// other.ts
it('general\\signin.ts', () => {
  cy.visit(`/}`); // not logged in
  cy.get('input[name=password]') // fails
    .type(password);
}

     Spec                                                Tests  Passing  Failing  Pending  Skipped
 ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
 │ √ test1.ts                                  00:13        2        2        -        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ √ test2.ts                                  00:22        4        4        -        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ √ test3.ts                                  00:11        2        2        -        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ √ test4.ts                                  00:06        1        1        -        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ √ test5.ts                                  00:06        1        1        -        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ √ test6.ts                                  00:06        1        1        -        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ × other.ts                                  01:52      108      100        8        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ × test7.ts                                  00:20        2        -        1        -        1 │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ √ test8.ts                                  00:05        1        1        -        -        - │
 ├────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
 │ √ test9.ts                                  00:05        1        1        -        -        - │
 └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
   2 of 10 failed (20%)                        03:31      123      113        9        -        1

Screenshot is from here but very similar to what I see.

Desired behavior:

Browser always loads and displays the the website when navigating to /.

What I’ve tried

• Run with electron (headless and headed) and with chrome (all fail)
• Increase the timeout for cy.get to 15 seconds (still fails)
• Navigating to /v=<number> instead of / to avoid any caching ( still fails)
• Run with npx cypress open and then Run all specs (this works / has not failed yet)
• Running similar tests against google.com and random react app from the web which passed so it seams this issue is not related to the testing environment but the combination of my website and Cypress CI.

Versions

Cypress	3.3.1
OS	Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016
Browsers	Electron (headed/headless), Chrome
Website	React based, makes use of websockets to load data
Webserver	runs on the same machine as cypress

---

To me it looks like the website is not quite compatible with Cypress CI’s testing behaviour - is there a list of pitfalls to know about when writing testable websites? Has anyone else had similar problems and found the problem or maybe a workaround?

Can I turn on some logging to get more insight into what may be going wrong? Configuring $env:DEBUG didn’t produce helpful output for me, nor do the cypress/logs. Maybe extracting the console.log from the browser

The only post I found related to this (occasionally .visit() doesn’t load the page, only happening in CI) was here.

[danlourenco]

Same here. This is very much still an issue on Cypress 3.8.2

[anitaejoseph]

I am also getting the same issue of blank page with cypress 9.5. I have upgraded to 9.5.2 version, still getting blank page after logging to my website.