You're It! Ersatz tagging in Cypress, using Saucectl.
Tags: saucelabs, cypress, tagging, organisation
Published: 2022-06-01 08:01:11

---
title: You're It! Ersatz tagging in Cypress, using Saucectl.
published: true
description: Cypress lacks native support for tagging; This guide shows you how to implement it using the Sauce Continuous Testing Library.
tags: saucelabs, cypress, tagging, organisation
cover_image: https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1571907483086-3c0ea40cc16d?ixlib=rb-1.2.1&ixid=MnwxMjA3fDB8MHxwaG90by1wYWdlfHx8fGVufDB8fHx8&auto=format&fit=crop&w=1470&q=80
---

## How good is tagging?  
Rhetorical question; Tagging is _great_; my favourite organisation system, in fact.  Test systems with tagging allow you the flexibility to organize your tests according to _what code_ they're testing, while running tests according to _what kind of test_ you're after.

## Tagging & Cypress
Unfortunately, Cypress lacks native support for tagging, and this makes me very sad face emoji.

Fortunately, with [`saucectl`](https://github.com/saucelabs/saucectl), we can retrofit tagging functionality onto our Cypress tests, whether you're running locally in Docker mode, or remotely against Sauce Labs' cloud.

## Wait, what's saucectl?
Let's go to the README!
>The saucectl command line interface orchestrates the tests in your framework, providing rich parallelization, test history filtering, and analytics in Sauce Labs.

Basically, saucectl is an amplifier for your tests.  It drags your Cypress, Playwright, TestCafe or Puppeteer kicking and screaming onto the Sauce Labs cloud, giving you delicious Sauce features (like analytics) along with all the goodies your framework has to offer.  Saucectl can _also_ run your tests with Docker, giving you a quick and reliable test environment.  It's a great solution for using Cypress with CI.

# Our Approach
In `config.yml` (the config file for `saucectl`), you can specify individual suites [see here](https://docs.saucelabs.com/web-apps/automated-testing/cypress/yaml/#suites) which let you provide individual config options to Cypress.

By passing the `testFiles` option to Cypress, you can control which individual files it runs.  We're going to combine these two, to give us individually named test suites, each of which runs tests with a specific set of tags.

## Can't you do that with Cypress alone?
Yes, _technically_, but I prefer this approach for... let's call them ideological reasons.

While you _could_ have individual config files, and call `cypress run --config-file somesuite.json` for each one, it's messy. If you make changes to one suite file, you have to make it across all of them, which is easy to forget.

With this solution, all your Cypress config stays as is, and only the tests being executed are changed.  Even better, control of which tests run is maintained in the _infrastructure_ configuration, and infrastructure is likely to have the most significant impact over what 'flavours' of test you want to run.

## How we're implementing tagging
This solution makes use of _globbing_, a way of selecting a group of files. It's pretty common; Common enough to have a [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glob_(programming)) page, and you've likely seen at least one glob before.

We're going to alter our tests so each test suite is configured to run a set of globs corresponding to our tagged tests.

## Example
### Suite Files
Say this is our test suite.  Each file contains tests that should only run on a specific browser (or combination of browsers).  We've named them so each filename includes the relevant tags, separated by underscores, like `_chromeOnly` or `_ieOnly`.  These could just as easily be `_ui` or `_FrenchLanguage` or anything you want to tag by.
```
specs/
  ui/
    login_chromeOnly_spec.js
    login_firefoxOnly_spec.js
  accounting/
    jsMathBugFix_ieOnly_spec.js
    chromiumCantCount_edgeOnly_chromeOnly_spec.js
```
### Config.yml
Here's the suites component of our `config.yml`. Each suite has a unique glob for testFiles which finds all tests in your specs folder which include the respective tag/s.
```
  suites:
    - name: "Where There's Smoke There's"
      browser: "firefox"
      platformName: "Windows 10"
      config:
        testFiles: ["specs/**/*firefoxOnly*_spec.js"]

    - name: "Cream on"
      browser: "chrome"
      platformName: "Windows 10"
      config:
        testFiles: ["specs/**/*chromeOnly*_spec.js"]

    - name: "Livin' on the"
      browser: "edge"
      platformName: "Windows 10"
      config:
        testFiles: ["specs/**/*edgeOnly*_spec.js", "specs/**/*ieOnly*_spec.js"]
```
### How it works
Each glob starts with `specs/**/*`.  This glob means "_start in the specs folder (`specs/`), then look in any subfolder(`**`), for any characters at all(`*`) followed by an underscore(`_`)".  

Let's look at how the first glob continues.  After `specs/**/*` we have `firefoxOnly*_spec.js`.  This means "_find anything containing the phrase `firefoxOnly`, followed by zero or more of any character(*), followed by `_spec.js_`".  For our tests, that only matches `specs/ui/login_firefoxOnly_spec.js`.

The second glob is `specs/**/*chromeOnly*_spec.js`, so it matches every file in every subfolder of `specs` which contains `chromeOnly`, followed by zero or more of any character, followed by `_spec.js`.  In our case, that's `specs/ui/login_chromeOnly_spec.js` AND `specs/accounting/chromiumCantCount_edgeOnly_chromeOnly_spec.js`

### Did you notice?
The `testFiles` parameter doesn't take a glob directly; it takes an _array_ of globs.  That lets us pass in multiple entries, which is how suite three works. We're able to pass in two entries, one for any test tagged `edgeOnly` and one for any tagged `ieOnly`.  It will match any file in _either_ of those blobs; in this case `specs/accounting/jsMathBugFix_ieOnly_spec.js` and `chromiumCantCount_edgeOnly_chromeOnly_spec.js`.

Additionally, test files can have _multiple tags_.  This is really useful when you want to run some tests in multiple scenarios; Say you have a limited set of functional tests that are also used to ensure deploys go well; You could tag them `_functional_postDeploy_spec.js` and they'd run when using _either_ the `_functional` tag or the `_postDeploy` one.

# And that's it!
A small change to how you name and select tests, and you're left with a more flexible testing system.  And of course, you can still run a default suite with _no_ tags, and make sure you're running everything.

Happy Testing!

#### Credits
Photo by [Angèle Kamp
](https://unsplash.com/@angelekamp?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/photos/KaeaUITiWnc?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditShareLink)