What is the advantage of Cypress commands over vanilla functions?

user_12044155 0
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It is known that in Cypress we can define custom commands in the commands.js file, with that syntax:

Cypress.Commands.add('login', (email, pw) => {})
Cypress.Commands.overwrite('visit', (orig, url, options) => {})

These commands will then become available across all our tests and can be used from the cy object.

cy.login('my@email.com', '123456')
cy.visit('www.stackoverflow.com', 'www.google.com', { redirect: true })

But I don't get the gist of it. What is the point of doing that when you could just write a regular function?

function login(email, pw) { /* ... */ }

login('my@email.com', '123456')

The only advantage I see is making the function available everywhere without having to export/import it, but you can do that with globals as well. Is that it, or am I missing something?

cypress
2 Answers

Don't make everything a custom command https://docs.cypress.io/api/cypress-api/custom-commands#Best-Practices JS function is great for grouping cy commands and preferable due to it simplicity and readability.

There’s no reason to add this level of complexity when you’re only wrapping a couple of commands only for avoiding Export/Import. Also don't be forget cypress provide API for overwriting existing commands not for only creating new commands.

user_113498130

Yes you are right! The goal is to write cleaner code and availability. With custom commands you can basically write the function in the form of a cypress command and also you don't have to write an import statement in the tests suites. Hence your test suite files remain uniform and cleaner.

user_45712710
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