Mac/Jenkins: Cypress needs a logged in user to run headless tests

Current behavior:

Our Jenkins is started through LaunchDaemons as some specific user, which is not logged in, and therefore has no running windowserver (SystemUIServer, or however this thing is called nowadays).

Jenkins then launches cypress run, which fails with:

_RegisterApplication(), FAILED TO establish the default connection to the WindowServer, _CGSDefaultConnection() is NULL.

and later on:

BrowserWindow.getExtensions is not a function
TypeError: BrowserWindow.getExtensions is not a function
    at Object.removeAllExtensions (/Users/Shared/Jenkins/Library/Caches/Cypress/4.4.0/Cypress.app/Contents/Resources/app/packages/server/lib/gui/windows.js:77:41)
...

This is the full log file.

I also noticed, when I am on my local machine, and do a cypress run, it pops up a Dock icon, which only has a main menu with a single Quit item, and points to ~/Library/Caches/Cypress/4.6.0/Cypress.app. I guess it shouldn’t do that either.

Workarounds

I found two workarounds:

• I switched from Electron to Chromium, and at least Chromium runs the tests, but cannot record vidoes.
• I logged in as the Jenkins user in the Console via Screen Sharing. Now Electron runs fine and does record videous. It also puts its icon into the Dock.

Desired behavior:

Cypress and Electron should not require a UI when running in headless mode.

To reproduce

• a Mac with two user accounts
• login as user A
• In Terminal: sudo su - B
• as user B, run cypress run

Strangely enough, in this case, simply logging in a user B as well does NOT fix the problem.

Versions

This applies to at least 4.40 - 4.6.0.

EDIT: 3.4.1 also does this, so this is NOT related to #7393

[marc-guenther]

Our workaround is to keep the Jenkins user permanently logged in via Screen Sharing… Which is something we need to remember, whenever we reboot the machine… 😉

[jesseadams]

This is still hitting us today. We haven’t found a workaround.