Cypress is going open source!

That’s right! After years of development and focused iteration with our early adopters, the most advanced front-end testing tool in the universe is almost ready for its ultimate adventure: going open source!

Here at Cypress HQ, we generally have several projects in motion at a time and this open source initiative is no exception. Let’s look at a few of the things that are coming down the pike for this launch.

Documentation overhaul

Over the last couple of years, our documentation has grown like a weed, and it’s getting hard for newcomers to find their way around. As modern web developers who use a lot of open source ourselves, we know that documentation is extremely important if you expect strangers to turn up and work with you!

Here’s some highlights of what we’re up to with our docs:

• We’re loving hexo and we’re using it for all of our documentation projects going forward.
• We’re kicking off this very blog to share timely information about the project as well as our opinions on testing trends and fads.
• Building a brand new documentation portal with a narrative flow, from Getting Started and Advanced Usage, all the way up to using the Dashboard and all the way down to hacking on the Cypress application code yourself.
• Creating a much-needed FAQ for all those… well, you know what a FAQ is!
• Making it dead simple to contribute so the community can join us in building and maintaining the most comprehensive source of information about the future of testing for the web.

Public beta

Cypress has been in a private beta since 2015, and we are nearing our public release! What’s that mean, anyway?

• Open Source All The Things!
• The Desktop Application will no longer require logging in.
• Anyone (everyone!) will be able to download and use the Desktop Application without contacting us first or signing up for anything.

Next minor release

Our next release is around the corner and will consist of several significant changes that help prepare for the big launch:

• Cypress is now a requireable node_module, versioned in your package.json per-project, and no longer a single, global application.
• Cypress has been converted from a dozen separate repos into a single large Monorepo.
• The Custom Command interface has been rewritten for easier usage
• New commands:
• cy.trigger for manually generating events
• cy.scrollTo and cy.scrollIntoView for, you guessed it, scrolling!

As always, the full changelog will be available here at release!