Tests are not run when express is required in the test file

It seems Cypress stops executing tests as soon as the express package is required within a test file.

Sample test file:

// ./cypress/integration/test_spec.js
var express = require("express");

describe("test", function() {
  it("case", () => {
    throw new Error("should fail");
  });
});

Running this test through cypress run gives this:

If the require call is commented, the test fails as expected.

My environment:

$ node --version
v6.0.0
$ cypress --version
Cypress CLI: 0.13.1

Express package version installed in node_modules: 4.14.1.

[chrisveness]

In case it’s helpful to anyone, I’ve found having this in my package.json works:

"scripts": {
    "test-cypress": "node app.js & pid=$!; cypress run; kill -9 $pid"
}

(using cypress 2.0.4).

[brian-mann]

We have not been opinionated about the server setup / teardown other than what we have in our public projects for CI scripts.

The reason is that the vast majority of our users only need to programmatically boot webservers in CI. Our users typically iterate in the headed browser all day so there’s not really ever a “start” and an “end” event. This is part of what separates Cypress from other browser automation tools. We’re like a long running experience which you use to drive, develop, and debug your application code all day.

Running headlessly from start to stop is really only useful in CI, its just not practical to run locally.

Since cypress can be spawned programmatically you could just write a simple wrapper using child_process in node.

We are actually in the middle of rewriting our CLI tool to be a requireable node_module which will have a nice API to do these things for you.

Here’s the open issue for that with some example API code.