Cypress FAQs

How do I hide the Cypress Panel?Why are cy.requests not shown in the Network monitor?How do I get debug logs?How do I use Replay with earlier versions of Cypress?How do I group tests ran in a matrix or across multiple runners into the same test run?What’s in the .replay folder?How do I confirm that the browsers are installed correctly What other environment variables can I configure?

How do I hide the Cypress Panel?

CYPRESS_NO_COMMAND_LOG should work in < 10 and > 10.3 (ish) and set automatically by the @replayio/cypress plugin on > 10.9

Why are cy.requests not shown in the Network monitor?

Cypress requests are made from the Electron process. Request details are available however in the step details panel.

How do I get debug logs?

Plugin debugging: logs about what the plugin is doing (no support file logs)

DEBUG=replay:cypress:* , or just DEBUG=replay:cypress:plugin

Browser debugging: everything that the browser and driver is doing

DEBUG=cypress:launcher:browsers RECORD_REPLAY_VERBOSE=1

All the logs

DEBUG=cypress:*,replay:* RECORD_REPLAY_VERBOSE=1

How do I use Replay with earlier versions of Cypress?

Replay works best with Cypress 10.9 or later but can be used with Cypress 8 or later with some additional environment configuration:

RECORD_ALL_CONTENT must be set when using replay-firefox to record replays

RECORD_REPLAY_METADATA_FILE must be set for either browser to capture metadata about the test run.

When running locally, you can set these variables in your npm scripts so they are set every time:

json
"scripts": {
	"test:cypress": "cypress run",
  "test:cypress:replay": "RECORD_ALL_CONTENT=1 RECORD_REPLAY_METADATA_FILE=/tmp/replay-metadata cypress run"
}

On CI, you can set these environment variables on the task that runs your tests:

yaml
  # Install NPM dependencies, cache them correctly  
  # and run all Cypress tests
  - name: Cypress run
    uses: cypress-io/github-action@v5
			with:
				browser: replay-chromium
			env:
				RECORD_ALL_CONTENT: 1
				RECORD_REPLAY_METADATA_FILE: /tmp/replay-metadata

How do I group tests ran in a matrix or across multiple runners into the same test run?

By default, each invocation of Cypress is grouped into a test run by a UUID generated when the run begins. To group multiple invocations of Cypress into the same run, set RECORD_REPLAY_METADATA_TEST_RUN_ID to the same UUID value and that will be used instead of generating a UUID for each.

Below is an example which runs three test suites using a matrix in Github Actions but groups the results into the same test run in Replay:

yaml
jobs:
  test-run-id:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    outputs:
      testRunId: ${{ steps.testRunId.outputs.testRunId }}
    steps:
      - id: testRunId
        run: echo testRunId=$(npx uuid) >> "$GITHUB_OUTPUT"
  test:
    needs: test-run-id
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      matrix:
        product: [frontend, backend, api]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v3
        with:
          node-version: 16
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: npm ci
      - name: Run
        run: npm run test-${{ matrix.product }}
        env:
          RECORD_REPLAY_METADATA_TEST_RUN_ID: ${{ needs.test-run-id.outputs.testRunId }}

What’s in the `.replay` folder?

/.replay/runtimes - this is where the replay browser(s) are installed

/ - recorded replays are saved locally in the root folder

If you’re trying to cache the browser download, cache ~/.replay/runtimes or simply cache it before creating replays.

How do I confirm that the browsers are installed correctly

Run ls -alR ~/.replay/runtimes to see the contents of the runtimes folder.

What other environment variables can I configure?

REPLAY_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD - keeps browsers from being downloaded and installed during npm install

RECORD_REPLAY_METADATA_TEST_RUN_TITLE - manually apply a test run title, instead of being inferred from the latest commit

RECORD_REPLAY_DIRECTORY - set a custom directory (default: ~/.replay)