Pick Tests By Network Calls

Published on April 2, 2025

How do you pick the tests to run? Do you run the changed specs first? Run tests that visit a particular page? Pick tests using test tags? This blog post will show yet another way of picking end-to-end Cypress tests to execute: by the network calls the tests make.

We can track the network calls each test makes using the super-powerful and awesome cy.intercept command:

cypress/support/e2e.js
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beforeEach(function () {
  cy.intercept(
    {
      resourceType: 'xhr',
    },
    (req) => {
      const method = req.method
      const parsed = new URL(req.url)

      let pathname = parsed.pathname
      // remove the random part of the pathname
      if (/\/todos\/\d+/.test(pathname)) {
        pathname = '/todos/:id'
      }
      console.log('intercepted', method, pathname)
    },
  )
})

We can see the intercepted network calls in the DevTools console

Intercepted network calls

We need to store these API calls somewhere. If you are using my plugin cypress-visited-urls it exposes a static method Cypress.addVisitedTestEvent that you can use to send custom events. The plugin stores these events and even keeps track of the event counts for each test.

cypress/support/e2e.js
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beforeEach(function () {
  // this method comes from the plugin
  // https://github.com/bahmutov/cypress-visited-urls
  if (Cypress.addVisitedTestEvent) {
    cy.intercept(
      {
        resourceType: 'xhr',
      },
      (req) => {
        const method = req.method
        const parsed = new URL(req.url)

        let pathname = parsed.pathname
        // remove the random part of the pathname
        if (/\/todos\/\d+/.test(pathname)) {
          pathname = '/todos/:id'
        }
        console.log('intercepted', method, pathname)

        Cypress.addVisitedTestEvent({
          label: 'API',
          data: { method, pathname },
        })
      },
    )
  }
})

🎁 You can find the complete source code shown in this blog post in the branch blog-post of the repo bahmutov/called-urls-examples.

Super, so if we run this test even once, it will save a JSON file

cypress-visited-urls.json
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{
  "cypress/e2e/complete-todo.cy.js": {
    "Todo app / completes a todo": {
      "urls": [
        {
          "url": "/app/index.html",
          "duration": 280,
          "commandsCount": 13
        }
      ],
      "testEvents": [
        {
          "label": "API",
          "data": {
            "method": "GET",
            "pathname": "/todos"
          },
          "count": 1
        },
        {
          "label": "API",
          "data": {
            "method": "PATCH",
            "pathname": "/todos/:id"
          },
          "count": 1
        },
        {
          "label": "API",
          "data": {
            "method": "DELETE",
            "pathname": "/todos/:id"
          },
          "count": 1
        }
      ]
    }
  }
}

You should commit this file with your source code update it periodically when running the tests on CI.

Finding the specs

Next, we need to define a Node script to find the specs by a network call. For example, we want to find all specs that delete items.

bin/find-specs.js
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#!/usr/bin/env node

// @ts-check

const debug = require('debug')('called-urls-examples')
const core = require('@actions/core')
const arg = require('arg')
const args = arg({
  // HTTP method name, case insensitive like "GET"
  '--method': String,
  // pathname, case sensitive like "/todos/:id"
  '--path': String,
  // output a list of specs or a table, list is the default
  '--output': String,
  // name of the GHA output, like "foundSpecs"
  '--set-gha-outputs': String,
  // limit the number of results, default is Infinity
  '--max': Number,
})
debug('args', args)

// HTTP method is case-insensitive
const method = (args['--method'] || '*').toUpperCase()
// Path is case-sensitive
const path = args['--path'] || '*'
const outputFormat = args['--output'] || 'list'
const max = args['--max'] || Infinity
debug({ method, path, outputFormat, max })

const matches = (eventData) => {
  if (method !== '*' && eventData.method !== method) {
    return false
  }

  if (path !== '*' && !eventData.pathname.includes(path)) {
    return false
  }

  return true
}

const visitedUrls = require('../cypress-visited-urls.json')
const summed = {}
debug('found info on %d specs', Object.keys(visitedUrls).length)

Object.entries(visitedUrls).forEach(([specFilename, testData]) => {
  // console.log(specFilename)
  Object.entries(testData).forEach(([testName, test]) => {
    const testEvents = test.testEvents
    testEvents
      .filter((event) => event.label === 'API')
      .forEach((event) => {
        if (matches(event.data)) {
          debug('Found match', event.data)
          const eventCount = event.count || 1
          if (!summed[specFilename]) {
            summed[specFilename] = { count: eventCount }
            debug('first match', specFilename, event.data)
          } else {
            debug(
              'adding match count %d to the existing count %d',
              eventCount,
              summed[specFilename].count,
            )
            summed[specFilename].count += eventCount
          }
        }
      })
  })
})

const sorted = Object.entries(summed)
  .sort((a, b) => {
    return b[1].count - a[1].count
  })
  .map(([specFilename, data]) => {
    return { specFilename, ...data }
  })
  .slice(0, max)
debug('found %d specs', sorted.length)
debug(sorted)

if (outputFormat === 'list') {
  console.log(sorted.map((s) => s.specFilename).join(','))
} else if (outputFormat === 'table') {
  if (sorted.length) {
    console.table(sorted)
  } else {
    console.log('No matching events found.')
  }
}

if (args['--set-gha-outputs']) {
  const outputName = args['--set-gha-outputs']
  debug('setting GHA outputs under name %s', outputName)
  const names = sorted.map((s) => s.specFilename).join(',')
  core.setOutput(outputName + 'N', sorted.length)
  core.setOutput(outputName, names)
}

Let's find the specs with tests where the application makes the network call DELETE /todos

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$ node ./bin/find-specs.js --method DELETE --path /todos
cypress/e2e/delete.cy.js,cypress/e2e/complete-todo.cy.js

So there are two specs that have tests that exercise the "delete item" feature. Let's see how many such calls the tests make

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$ node ./bin/find-specs.js --method DELETE --path /todos --output table
┌─────────┬───────────────────────────────────┬───────┐
│ (index) │ specFilename                      │ count │
├─────────┼───────────────────────────────────┼───────┤
│ 0       │ 'cypress/e2e/delete.cy.js'        │ 4     │
│ 1       │ 'cypress/e2e/complete-todo.cy.js' │ 1     │
└─────────┴───────────────────────────────────┴───────┘

So during delete.cy.js spec execution the app deletes 4 different items, and that is why this spec filename is shown first. We can feed this list directly into Cypress "run" command

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$ npx cypress run --spec $(node ./bin/find-specs.js --method DELETE --path /todos)

====================================================================================================

  (Run Starting)

  ┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
  │ Cypress:        14.2.1                                                                         │
  │ Browser:        Electron 130 (headless)                                                        │
  │ Node Version:   v20.11.1 (/Users/bahmutov/.nvm/versions/node/v20.11.1/bin/node)                │
  │ Specs:          2 found (delete.cy.js, complete-todo.cy.js)                                    │
  │ Searched:       cypress/e2e/delete.cy.js, cypress/e2e/complete-todo.cy.js                      │
  │ Experiments:    experimentalRunAllSpecs=true                                                   │
  └────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Beautiful.

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