Cypress Plugins & Libraries —Must for Seamless Testing

Kishor Munot
5 min readJul 17, 2024

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Cypress

Hello Readers,

We are going to discuss some Cypress plugins and libraries that we can use while automating web application tests through Cypress and make our testing seamless. We know that in Cypress we can try and achieve many things for better test coverage for web projects by installing other plugins.

Cypress has gained widespread adoption in the development community due to its simplicity, reliability, and powerful features. However, to maximize its potential and streamline your testing workflow, leveraging additional plugins and libraries can be immensely beneficial.

In this blog, we’ll explore the must-have plugins and libraries that complement Cypress, offering solutions to common testing challenges and enhancing your overall testing capabilities. From simplifying test authoring to extending Cypress’s functionality, these plugins will elevate your testing process to new heights.

cypress-real-events

As a test automation engineer, you’re always looking for ways to make your tests more accurate and reliable. That’s where Cypress Real Events comes in. This powerful feature of Cypress allows you to simulate real user interactions, like mouse clicks and keyboard inputs, in your tests. By using Cypress Real Events, you can create more realistic and comprehensive tests without sacrificing speed or efficiency.

Cypress Real Events allows you to test your application under real-world conditions. By simulating real user interactions, you can uncover issues that may not be caught by traditional test automation tools.

For example, you may find that certain elements on your page are difficult to click on or that certain keyboard inputs are not registering correctly. By identifying these issues early on, you can prevent them from becoming larger problems down the line.

Another benefit of Cypress Real Events is that it allows you to create more maintainable tests. Because Cypress is able to capture and replay user interactions, your tests will be more readable and easier to understand. You won’t need to write as many custom commands or special functions to simulate user interactions, which means that your tests will be simpler and easier to maintain over time.

Checkout the plugin here

cypress-expect

Cypress expect is a very nice plugin to assert the test output and get the expected result.This plugin I use to verify the tests ran and finished with expected results, even when a test is expected to fail.

Checkout the plugin here

cypress-timestamps

cypress-timestamps is very useful feature. In a project, I wanted to check page load time and with this plugin, I checked and logged the time in Cypress logs. If the page doesn’t load within 3 seconds, it returns the proper error message.

Check out the plugin here..

cypress-should-really

cypress-should-really is very useful to improve our should assertion process. Sometimes we cannot do assertion with should that time this plugin helps us for the same.

Check out the plugin here..

Faker

Data plays an important role in Cypress or in any automation tool and most of the time we need fresh data for our tests so when we need any random email, password or contact number faker plugin comes into the picture.

Just checkout plugin here..

cypress-cucumber-preprocessor

This plugin is very useful when we have to work with Cypress Cucumberor we have to write our tests in the Gherkin language with the Given When Then format. We can implement BDD practices in our testing workflow. BDD encourages collaboration between non-technical stakeholders (e.g., product owners, and business analysts) and developers by writing tests in plain language (Gherkin) that everyone can understand.

Checkout plugin here

eslint-plugin-cypress

ESLint is the officially recommended Cypress plugin that will run linting via ESLint on your spec files and display linting errors in your cypress source code.

When you are working with visual studio code if your cypress code has any format, style, spelling related errors, these errors can be get fixed using the extension ESLint.

Checkout plugin here.

cypress-plugin-api

We know that Cypress supports API testing and we can test API and verify response with the same. This plugin is playing very important role while API testing with Cypress. The biggest benefit is the same as with tools like the postman. you get visual feedback and you get to examine your APIs, explore the data, a simple table for viewing cookies, and color coding of methods in UI view and in the timeline.

Snapshot of cypress-plugin-API

shopify-cypress-graphql

This plugin is used for test or intercept graphql api in Cypress.

cy.interceptGql

This command sets up spies and stubs for a GraphQL endpoint, similar to cypress route intercepts. This registers a top-level route alias called GraphQL. Optionally, but definitely encouraged is providing an array of known operations, which will then be registered as sub-operations with their own aliases.

Checkout plugin here

cypress-keycloak-commands

cypress-keycloak-commands is used for simplifying authentication and authorization in your automation tests.

Checkout plugin here

cypress-failed-log

This plugin gives details reports about failed tests in Cypress.

Checkout plugin here

cypress/xpath

We know that Cypress is based on javascript and we can use css in our tests but since we used xpath in selenium we got used to it so if you want to use it in cypress you can definitely use this plugin.

checkout plugin here

Cy-verify-downloads

As the name suggests, this Cypress plugin can be used to validate if a file has been downloaded during your automation testing. It is common for applications to offer file downloads to their users and that is why this plugin has found its spot in our list of best Cypress plugins.

Checkout plugin here.

These plugins are very useful in Cypress automation. Just install the plugin in your automation suite and let me know your experience with it.

I hope this has been useful, thanks for reading!

Applaud the story will definitely be a great thought!!!😊

I’d like to hear your thoughts and if you have anything to share that would be wonderful for the community.

Thank you.. 😊

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