cypress/DEPLOY.md

Deployment

Anyone can build the binary and NPM package, but you can only deploy the Cypress application and publish the NPM module cypress if you are a member of cypress NPM organization.

⚠️ See the publishing section for how to build, test and publish a new official version of the binary and cypress NPM package.

Set next version on CIs

We build the NPM package and binary on all major platforms (Linux, Mac, Windows) on different CI providers. In order to set the version while building we have to set the environment variable with the new version on each CI provider before starting the build.

Use script command npm run set-next-ci-version to do this.

Building the NPM package

Building a new NPM package is very quick.

• Increment the version in the root package.json
• cd cli && npm run build

The steps above:

• Build the cypress NPM package
• Transpiles the code into ES5 version to be compatible with the common Node versions
• Puts the result into the cli/build folder.

You could publish from there, but first you need to build and upload the binary with the same version; this guarantees that when users do npm i cypress@<x.y.z> they can download the binary with the same version x.y.z from Cypress CDN service.

Building the binary

First, you need to build, zip and upload the application binary to the Cypress server.

You can use a single command to do all tasks at once:

npm run binary-deploy

You can also specify each command separately:

npm run binary-build
npm run binary-zip
npm run binary-upload

You can pass options to each command to avoid answering questions, for example

npm run binary-deploy -- --platform darwin --version 0.20.0
npm run binary-upload -- --platform darwin --version 0.20.0 --zip cypress.zip

If something goes wrong, see the debug messages using the DEBUG=cypress:binary ... environment variable.

Because we had many problems reliably zipping the built binary, for now we need to build both the Mac and Linux binary from Mac (Linux binary is built using a Docker container), then zip it from Mac, then upload it.

Linux Docker

If you are using a Mac you can build the linux binary if you have docker installed.

npm run binary-build-linux

Publishing

In order to publish a new cypress package to the NPM registry, we must build and test it across multiple platforms and test projects. This makes publishing directly into the NPM registry impossible. Instead we:

• Build the package (with the new target version baked in) and the binary.
• Build the Linux and Windows binaries on CircleCI and AppVeyor.
• Upload the binaries and the new NPM package to the Cypress CDN under the "beta" url.
• Launch the test CI projects, like cypress-test-node-versions and cypress-test-example-repos with unique urls instead of installing from the NPM registry.

A typical installation looks like this:

export CYPRESS_INSTALL_BINARY=https://cdn.../binary/<new version>/hash/cypress.zip
npm i https://cdn.../npm/<new version>/hash/cypress.tgz

• All test projects are triggered automatically by the build projects, but we need to look at CIs to make sure the new binary and NPM package really work without breaking any of the tests.
• Each binary and NPM package has the new version inside and in the URL, for example 1.0.5. The url also contains the original commit SHA from which it was built.
• Build the Mac binary and upload (see above) to the CDN. Make sure to build it from the same commit as the binaries built by CI.

next steps are about to change

old way

• The upload from Mac binary will create new folder on CDN like https://cdn.../desktop/1.0.5/darwin-x64. We need to create parallel subfolders for Windows and Linux binaries. Go to the AWS console and create them. In this case you would create folders desktop/1.0.5/linux-x64 and desktop/1.0.5/win32-x64.
• Copy the tested binaries from the unique binary folder into desktop/1.0.5 subfolders for each platform.

new way

• run script that finds and copies built binaries for each platform into the final desktop download folder

$ npm run move-binaries -- --sha <commit sha> --version <new target version>

This requires AWS access information in environment variable like. A variable looks like this

aws_credentials_json={"bucket": "cdn.cypress.io","folder": "desktop","key": "...","secret":"..."}

If you need to see verbose logs, run with DEBUG=cypress:binary environment variable. If you use as-a utility it probably looks like this for a particular commit and version

$ as-a move-binaries npm run move-binaries -- --sha 455046b928c861d4457b2ec5426a51de1fda74fd --version 3.3.0

continue

• Publish the new NPM package under the dev tag. The unique link to the package file cypress.tgz is the one already tested above. You can publish to the NPM registry straight from the URL:

    $ npm publish https://cdn.../npm/1.0.5/<long sha>/cypress.tgz --tag dev
    + cypress@1.0.5
  

• Check that the new version has the right tag using available-versions

    $ vers cypress
    0.20.1                      16 days
    0.20.2                      3 days             latest
    1.0.5                       a few seconds ago  dev
  

• Test cypress@1.0.5 again to make sure everything is working. You can trigger test projects from command line (if you have the appropriate permissions)

    node scripts/test-other-projects.js --npm cypress@1.0.5 --binary 1.0.5
  

• Update and publish the changelog

• Close issues (with a link to the changelog).

• Update the NPM dist tag to latest using npm dist-tag add cypress@1.0.5 --otp <code>.

• Update the manifest.json for download server npm run binary-release -- --version 1.0.5

• Push out the updated changes to the manifest for on.cypress.io if needed.

• Push out an updated kitchen sink if needed.

• Close the release in Zenhub.

• Bump version in package.json from develop branch and then merge into master.

• Publish GitHub release doc using cypress-io/set-releases

• Add a note to each GH issue that has been resolved with the new published version using https://github.com/cypress-io/issues-in-release

Take a break, you deserve it! 😎