How do Cypress tests work with CSS (Community Solid Server)?

[NoelDeMartin]

I'm opening this discussion to answer a question that came up in Matrix from @mrkvon:

I didn't understand a couple of things in your example, which confused me:

• How did you authenticate to the CSS to reset Solid pod (resetSolidPod)? I haven't seen any login process there. Is there a cookie i don't see, or do you have a magical way to send unauthenticated requests into CSS?
• You seem to be using top-level account sometimes, is that correct? like http://localhost:4000/cookbook/... How does that work?

The resetSolidPod task doesn't actually authenticate, so it's only deleting resources that don't require an account and these are the ones that live under http://localhost:4000/cookbook/. This may not be viable in other apps, but Umai supports multiple authentication methods. At the moment, it has two:

• Inrupt authenticator: This one is used in production, and uses Inrupt's authentication library to authenticate on the POD.

• Local storage authenticator: This one is only used during development, and doesn't authenticate at all. CSS allows creating resources in the server without authentication if they're not part of a user account, although I'm not familiar with the details. But I know it works and it makes my life easier for development and writing tests :).

So there are two types of tests in the repo:

• Authenticated tests: Mostly inside of authorization.spec.ts and authentication.spec.ts. I only write these when I need to test something that has to do with authentication, but I try to avoid it otherwise because tests are slower to run (they need to interact with CSS through the UI). Additionally, authenticated network requests to the POD can't be run from Cypress itself, because it's not possible to get the authentication token out of Inrupt's library (that I'm aware of). So they are run calling app methods from Cypress (look at the runAuthenticatedRequest and queueAuthenticatedRequest methods). The documents created like this are not deleted with the resetSolidPOD task either, they are deleted in the cssReset method.

• Unauthenticated tests: These are all the rest, and a lot easier to work with (and run faster!). These ones just run requests against the POD from Cypress, for example look at the createSolidDocumentAnonymously method. The documents created like this are the ones that are deleted in the resetSolidPod task.

And I think that's pretty much it, let me know if you have any more questions :).

[NoelDeMartin]

For anyone ending up here, it seems there is a better way now to log in from Cypress, but I haven't tried it yet. If you want to check that out, here are some pointers:

• https://communitysolidserver.github.io/CommunitySolidServer/6.x/usage/client-credentials/
• https://github.com/solidcryptpad/solidcryptpad/blob/main/cypress/support/css-authentication.ts

(thanks @Otto-AA!)

[NoelDeMartin]

Hey, in case anyone ends up here, I have good news! I ended up implementing that new approach, and I just released a Cypress plugin to help you with that :D. Let me know if you need some help setting it up in your projects!

https://github.com/NoelDeMartin/cypress-solid