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.

ℹ️ 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

Building the NPM package

⚠️ Note: The steps in this section are automated in CI, and you should not generally need to do them yourself.

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

⚠️ Note: The steps in this section are automated in CI, and you should not generally need to do them yourself.

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.

Building Linux binary in Docker

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

npm run binary-build-linux

Publishing

Before Publishing a New Version

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 have CI set up to do the following on every commit to develop:

1. Build the NPM package with the new target version baked in.
2. Build the Linux/Mac binaries on CircleCI and build Windows on AppVeyor.
3. Upload the binaries and the new NPM package to the cdn.cypress.io under the "beta" folder.
4. Launch the test projects like cypress-test-node-versions and cypress-test-example-repos using the newly-uploaded package & binary instead of installing from the NPM registry. That installation looks like this:

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

Multiple test projects are launched for each target operating system, and the results are reported back to GitHub using status checks so that it is easy to see if a change has broken real-world usage of Cypress. You can see the progress of the test projects by opening the status checks on GitHub:

Once all test projects are reliably working with new changes, publishing can proceed.

Steps to Publish a New Version

1. Make sure that you have the correct environment variables set up before proceeding.
   • You'll need Cypress AWS access keys in aws_credentials_json, which looks like this:

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

   • You'll need a GitHub token, a CircleCI token, and a cypress-io account-specific AppVeyor token in ci_json:

     ci_json={"githubToken":"...","circleToken":"...","appVeyorToken":"..."}
     

   • Tip: Use as-a to manage environment variables for different situations.
2. Use the move-binaries script to move the binaries for <commit sha> from beta to the desktop folder for <new target version>

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

3. 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/3.4.0/<long sha>/cypress.tgz --tag dev
   

4. Double-check that the new version has been published under the dev tag using npm info cypress or available-versions:

   dist-tags:
   dev: 3.4.0     latest: 3.3.2
   

5. Test cypress@3.4.0 again to make sure everything is working. You can trigger test projects from the command line (if you have the appropriate permissions)

   node scripts/test-other-projects.js --npm cypress@3.4.0 --binary 3.4.0
   

6. Update and publish the changelog and any release-specific documentation changes in cypress-documentation.
7. Make the new NPM version the "latest" version by updating the dist-tag latest to point to the new version:

   npm dist-tag add cypress@3.4.0
   

8. Run binary-release to update the download server's manifest, set the next CI version, and create an empty version commit:

   npm run binary-release -- --version 3.4.0 --commit`
   

9. Tag the current commit with v3.4.0 and push that tag up.
10. If needed, push out the updated changes to the docs manifest to on.cypress.io.
11. If needed, push out an updated kitchen sink.
12. Close the release in ZenHub.
13. Bump version in package.json from develop branch and then merge into master.
14. Using cypress-io/release-automations:
    • Publish GitHub release to cypress-io/cypress/releases using package set-releases (see its README for details).
    • Add a comment to each GH issue that has been resolved with the new published version using package issues-in-release (see its README for details)

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