Cypress JSON Test Results

Sometimes you want to run the Cypress tests and do something based on the number of tests passed or failed. You need the test results in a JSON format, maybe saved as a text file. There are three ways to do this:

Wrap Cypress in your CLI

You can wrap the Cypress NPM module API in your CLI script. Your script will get all test results as a JSON object and then can run other programs to process the test results further.

const cypress = require('cypress')
cypress.run({ ... }).then(results => ...)

I used this approach several times, see my blog post Wrap Cypress Using NPM Module API.

Use JSON reporter

Cypress comes with built-in reporters plus you can bring your own. If you want to output JSON results into a separate file, you could try

npx cypress run --reporter json --reporter-options output=result.json

There is a problem though: the JSON reporter removes the standard terminal output. If you want to write the JSON results and the typical terminal output, you would need to install something like cypress-multi-reporters and configure it ... just to save the test results as a JSON file. Which brings us to the third way of saving the test results - via a plugin.

Use cypress-json-results

I wrote the plugin cypress-json-results specifically to make saving the JSON results file super simple. Install the plugin and add it to your plugin file:

$ npm i -D cypress-json-results
+ [email protected]

cypress/plugins/index.js

module.exports = (on, config) => {
  // `on` is used to hook into various events Cypress emits
  // `config` is the resolved Cypress config

  // https://github.com/bahmutov/cypress-json-results
  require('cypress-json-results')({
    on,
    filename: 'results.json', // default filename
  })
}

Once you run the tests, you should see a message like this after all the tests have finished

cypress-json-results: wrote results to results.json

The saved file has each spec that executed locally with the test status.

results.json

{
  "cypress/integration/spec.js": {
    "receives the right text file": "passed",
    "visits the text file": "passed",
    "visits the Markdown file": "passed",
    "converts the Markdown file": "passed"
  }
}

The standard terminal output stays unchanged.

🎁 You can find the example application with cypress-json-results plugin in the repo bahmutov/check-text-file-example.