Filter or grep specific tests to run (like mocha grep pattern)

[hannah06]

Current behavior:

Run specific files but cannot choose specific single/multi tests.

Desired behavior:

Choose expected tests to run, like mocha grep pattern.
Though we put a group of tests in a spec file, but sometimes we just want to run parts of them, so we need filter them out.

[jennifer-shehane]

From mocha docs:

-g, --grep <pattern> only run tests matching <pattern>

The --grep option when specified will trigger mocha to only run tests matching the given pattern which is internally compiled to a RegExp.

Suppose, for example, you have “api” related tests, as well as “app” related tests, as shown in the following snippet; One could use --grep api or --grep app to run one or the other. The same goes for any other part of a suite or test-case title, --grep users would be valid as well, or even --grep GET.

described ('api', function() {
  describe('GET /api/users', function() {
    it('respond with an array of users', function() {
      // ...
    });
  });
});

describe('app', function() {
  describe('GET /users', function() {
    it('respond with an array of users', function() {
      // ...
    });
  });
});

[smccarthy]

+1

[kuceb]

I personally like the idea of tagging tests, because you don't have to worry about organization as much. It would be nice to find all the tests related to something using only the concept of Tagging, as explained in the mocha wiki below:

https://github.com/mochajs/mocha/wiki/Tagging

Tagging

visionmedia edited this page on Oct 10, 2012 · 2 revisions
Mocha's --grep feature may be used both on the client (via ?grep=) and server-side. Recent releases of Mocha allow you to also click on the suite or test-case names in the browser to automatically grep them. The concept of Tagging utilizes regular grepping, however may be a useful way to keep related tests in the same spot, while still conditionally executing them.

A good example of this is if you wanted to run slow tests only before releasing, or periodically. You could use any sequence of characters you like, perhaps #slow, @slow to tag them as shown here:

describe('app', function(){
  describe('GET /login', function(){
    it('should respond with the login form @fast', function(){
      
    })
  })

  describe('GET /download/:file', function(){
    it('should respond with the file @slow', function(){
      
    })
  })
})

To execute fast tests only then you may do --grep @fast. Another alternative is to only tag @slow, and utilize --grep @slow --invert to invert the grep expression.

[MaaikeFox]

+1!
We would really be helped with this feature. We don't use cucumber so we can not use the tag feature for that. And we want to stay close to the original Cypress without hacking things in ourselves.

We have a complex system with several services and applications working together. Cypress covers the End-to-end tests on all of this together. So we want to be able to select groups of tests on CI (Gitlab) to not have to run all tests every time but only a relevant selection of the tests.

[fakiolinho]

This would be a super useful feature especially when we are testing a big app so we want to split our e2e tests somehow into suites after tagging them accordingly.

[jesusochoahelp]

This would be really useful. Being able to only run smoke test TCs from different files makes organization easier.

[rachelsevier]

This would be so useful!

[ziyailkemerogul]

I've been searching for this nice feature in Cypress and found out this post, thanks to @hannah06 .

Here are my thoughts on this feature:

I have lots of test cases with different priorities and I want to tag them according to their priorities. Actually, it's not for just a priority like; "Critical", "High", "Medium", "Low", I can use tags like "Functional", "Non-Functional", "Smoke", "UI", etc. So, I can group and run my tests, how I want or how I structure. Sometimes I just want to be able to run only the "Critical" cases, or "Critical" and "UI" cases. By this way, we will be able to structure more dynamic tests.