Import Cypress functions, no more globals

Current behavior:

Cypress uses global variables: describe, it, etc. This is implicit and makes it unclear where they are coming from. Linters also don’t like it and for good reason. On top of that, I really dislike the BDD style and would much prefer TDD (naming these suite and test), but I can’t do that since Cypress dictates the name for me and I would never want test as a global variable (too generic and easy to conflict with other pieces of code). There are numerous downsides to global variables and the entire web platform is moving away from them.

Desired behavior:

I can import what I need from Cypress. Something like:

const { describe, it } = require('cypress');

Versions

All versions.

[janosh]

I’ve only recently started using Cypress and so far the onboarding experience has been great. Props to you!

However, regarding this particular question, I think Cypress still has room for improvement. Without meaning to sound condescending, who the heck thought using globals for testing was a good idea in the first place?

Saying other popular frameworks do it this way is no legitimate argument in my opinion. You’re still following suit on a bad practice that has proven time and again in software development to lead to confusion, unnecessary tooling and setup steps, and in the end “magical” seeming code. And in return what are the benefits?

With ESM, JavaScript now has such a nice and widely adopted standard for imports and exports. Let’s all #UseThePlatform.

[xiaoxiangmoe]

Any update about this feature?

It will help us a lot for monorepo users. See: https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/1319#issuecomment-517489190