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LibreCat-Frontend-Tests uses Cypress for integration tests. Cypress is a test framework that allows you to run & debug tests in a user interface, as well as run them on the command line. Cypress is currently available for Chrome related browsers on Linux and Mac. Tests are written in JavaScript, but can also use all ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) features since it integrates with the Babel compiler.

Cypress integrates with all common continuous integration software (including Travis CI) and allows you to review recorded test runs on its Dashboard.

Cypress is very well documented and has a Gitter chatbox where you can ask for support. Also, Cypress is planned to be open sourced at the end of 2017.

The Cypress ecosystem

Cypress combines its own core features for browsing through a website with the power of other widely used frameworks for writing tests.

• mocha to structure tests
• chai to define expectations/assertions
• jQuery for finding elements in a web page

Cypress enhances interacting with the web, which is mostly asynchronous, with a synchronous API. This makes it easy to understand and maintain Cypress tests. In a Cypress test, the API is exposed via the cy object. Most common Cypress methods are chainable; they produce a result, which is passed on as the subject of the next chained command:

cy.get('.header h1')
    .should('be.visible')
    .should('have.text', 'This is the title')
    .next('a:contains("Edit")')
    .click();

In practice each command executed on cy is scheduled and will execute after the previous command has finished. Most commands will retry their action a number of milliseconds until it succeeds, so a test will not fail when you try to get an element in a page that is still rendering.

If a command times out, the test will fail. These timeouts are configurable and depend on the type of command.

Common Cypress methods

• visit(url) for loading a web page
• get(selector) for chaining an element by a jQuery selector
• contains(text) for chaining an element by the text it contains
• should(<multiple variations>) for defining assertions (see also )
• location() for accessing the location object
• title() for accessing the document title
• type(text) for typing text into a form element
• click() for clicking an element
• its(property) for reducing the chain to a property of the current subject
• then(callbackFn) for executing custom code in a callback function

Cypress also delivers a bunch of functions for traversing the DOM you may already know from jQuery which behave as you would expect: find, closest, filter, not, children, parent, parents, first, next, prev, eq, siblings, each,...

The complete API is documented here.