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Comment by adventureadmin | Hacker News Reader

What's your backend written in? I'm in a similar position where work is pushing cypress, but there is no library for cypress in our backend language, there is for playwright. I want to do something in the frontend, and check the backend, so it would be nice to use our existing backend language for both so we have access to our internal library. I was told we could write a bash script and have cypress exec. Of course we can do a script in any language, but suddenly I'm seeing a bash QA library emerging at my work. Does that sound absurd to anyone else?

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What do you mean with "check the backend"? You can e.g. do assertions on HTTP-responses coming from the backend - is this what you head in mind?

If you want to test the backend on its own, I personally would recommend using a different framework than cypress (or a different framework than the one being used for frontend e2e testing in general). Otherwise you risk that people conflate these two things and start "testing the backend" in e2e-tests for the frontend, which are super slow.

Yeah, specifically that interfacing with the ui causes some side effects we would expect to happen (web hooks sent, reports generated, etc). I definitely wouldn't want to write all of our tests that way, because that sounds like a nightmare to maintain and run, but was considering a handful for covering a few major features. We do already have a very extensive backend integration test suite (http / rest interactions) that doesn't do anything with UIs, though.

Cypress is a recent addition for us, so this is more a curiousity than anything else. I've done similar fully e2e / functional tests with puppeteer in the past.

Our backend is in node / typescript, so it's theoretically possible to mix the two. I would be able to test what I need using REST APIs, though, so in theory the backend language doesn't really matter for me.

I haven't had much time to try anything yet, but cypress's override of promises and async / await makes me think it'll be a pain to try adding non-cypress-specific checks to a cypress test.

Ideally you should not combine Cypress Frontend end to end tests with backend testing.

You use Cypress to do something on the frontend, which triggers something on the backend and ideally that change is reflected on the frontend, you test that frontend change using Cypress.

For backend testing just directly call the backend API's and then check the database directly.

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