Recently I was working on some Cypress tests, the first time I used them if I had to be honest, and I came across an issue. I wanted to run the test files individually but when I tried the solutions I found on the internet (StackOverflow and so on), no one of them worked for me. My setup was very bare, I didn’t even have a front end project as my tests involved sending requests to an API and asserting the HTTP responses, and the JSON values in the body. Being very new to Cypress I’m not sure if the following is the right way to go but I was executing the tests using command prompt and then reading the results using MochAwesome and an HTML file it produced. When researching online I read that there’s a some sort of a UI for running tests and reading results, but that was not my approach.

Instead I went for this approach. Inside the integration folder I created subfolders for each environment I wanted test. That is the reason why I had separate, individual files. Different environments have different credentials and environment variables. In the individual subfolders I had my JS test file. So roughly, my directory was like this

->root
  ->cypress
    ->integration
      ->development
        ->testfile.js
      ->staging
        ->testfile.js
      ->production
        ->testfile.js
  ->node_modules
  ->cypress.json
  ->package.json
  ->package-lock.json

Once I had that setup all I had to do was execute the following command on cmd.

npx cypress run --spec "cypress/integration/development/**"

Worth noting that if there had to be more than one JS test file inside a particular subfolder, say development, in that case all of the JS test files will be executed so yes I admit, technically speaking the title of this blog post isn’t accurate because this solution works for just one JS test file per subfolder, but hey who’s not guilty of implementing a not so clean solution?

Anyway, thanks for reading and I hope this is useful to some frustrated developer who can’t find a way to run cypress tests the way he/she wishes.

See you next post,
Bjorn