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Feedback during local development

While there are some workarounds possible with browser extensions or Cypress plugins, the most reliable solution for local development is to record to Cypress Cloud from your local development machine. This allows you to run a small set of tests directly related to your changes and fully skip your build pipeline and CI processes. It can be run with a one line command:

npx cypress run --key <record_key> --record --spec "cypress/e2e/my-spec.cy.js"

(You can skip the --key option by setting CYPRESS_RECORD_KEY as an environment variable. Learn more about recording in our docs about recorded runs).

This has 3 key benefits:

  • Accuracy - you will see exactly what Cypress does with your new code changes, taking into account your project's configuration, and using the Cloud's version of Axe CoreĀ®. There will be no violations reports for rules, pages, or elements your team has chosen to ignore, for example.
  • Speed - since the application is already built locally, while you are working on it, it is ready to test immediately without your build pipeline
  • Scope - you can run only the tests you need, which can make results even faster, and helps you exclude issues unrelated to the area you are working on

One other reason to get early feedback this way is to quickly know if, in fixing one accessibility problem, youā€™ve revealed or introduced another. Recording small runs locally is a big quality-of-life improvement when you are specifically looking for this kind of feedback.

If you expect your team to do a lot of runs this way and that these partial results would clutter your Cypress project, you can set up a dedicated Cloud project for ā€œlocally generatedā€ runs to keep things organized.