Proxy Configuration

Cypress needs Internet access to work. Many companies require the use of a corporate proxy to access the Internet. If your company does this, many functions of Cypress will not work until you've configured Cypress to use your proxy:

Cypress won't be able to load web pages besides localhost.
Cypress won't be able to warn you if your baseUrl isn't available.
Cypress won't be able to connect to the Dashboard Service to log in or record test runs.
npm install cypress may fail while downloading the Cypress binary.

If you are experiencing any or all of these issues, you may need to configure Cypress with your proxy. Instructions are available for macOS, Linux, and Windows.

Proxy Auto-Configuration (PAC) files are not currently supported. If your organization uses a PAC file, contact a network administrator to ask what HTTP proxy you should be using to access the general Internet, then use that proxy with Cypress.

SOCKS proxies are not currently supported. A workaround is to set up an HTTP proxy locally that points to your SOCKS proxy, then using that HTTP proxy with Cypress. Read more about forwarding an HTTP proxy through SOCKS.

Set a proxy on Linux or macOS

To set your proxy on Linux or macOS, run the following command in a terminal before running Cypress:

export HTTP_PROXY=http://my-company-proxy.com

You can also set NO_PROXY to bypass the proxy for certain domains (by default, only localhost will be bypassed):

export NO_PROXY=localhost,google.com,apple.com

To make these changes permanent, you can add these commands to your shell's ~/.profile (~/.zsh_profile, ~/.bash_profile, etc.) to run them on every login.

Set a proxy on Windows

When starting up after being installed, Cypress will attempt to load the proxy configured in the Windows registry by default. Learn how to set your proxy settings system-wide in Windows.

When downloading Cypress for the first time, the cypress command line tool does not read proxy settings from the Windows registry. If you need to configure a proxy for the installation to work, you must set the appropriate environment variables as described below.

You can also set proxy environment variables before running Cypress to override the Windows registry. This is also the only way to define a proxy for cypress install. In Command Prompt, defining the required environment variables looks like this:

set HTTP_PROXY=http://my-company-proxy.com

To accomplish the same thing in PowerShell:

$env:HTTP_PROXY = "http://my-company-proxy.com"

To save the HTTP_PROXY variable and use your proxy for all new shells, use setx:

setx HTTP_PROXY http://my-company-proxy.com

Proxy environment variables

This section refers to your operating system's environment variables, not Cypress environment variables

Cypress automatically reads from your system's HTTP_PROXY environment variable and uses that proxy for all HTTP and HTTPS traffic. If an HTTPS_PROXY environment variable is set, HTTPS traffic will use that proxy instead.

To bypass the proxy for certain domains, a NO_PROXY environment variable can be set to a comma-separated list of domain names to not proxy traffic for. By default, traffic to localhost will not be proxied. To make Cypress send traffic for localhost through the proxy, pass <-loopback> in NO_PROXY.

If an uppercase and a lowercase version of the proxy settings are supplied (for example, HTTP_PROXY and http_proxy are both set), the lowercase variable will be preferred.

Using a custom certificate authority (CA)

This section refers to npm config variables and node environment variables, not Cypress environment variables

Cypress needs to be able to authenticate properly when communicating to the Dashboard Service. When connecting through a proxy, oftentimes a self signed certificate is used as a CA. In order to handle this configuration, Cypress automatically reads from npm config's cafile and ca options and the NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS node environment variable.

To mimic the behavior of npm and node, Cypress looks at cafile first and then ca and uses the corresponding certificate(s) as a replacement for the CA. For example, to use the CA at /home/person/certs/ca.crt, add the following to your .npmrc:

cafile=/home/person/certs/ca.crt

If neither cafile nor ca are set, Cypress looks at the system environment variable NODE_EXTRA_CA_CERTS and uses the corresponding certificate(s) as an extension for the trusted CA.

Note that the npm config is used as a replacement, and the node environment variable is used as an extension.

View, unset, and set environment variables

In order to properly configure your proxy configuration, it can be helpful to know how to view currently set environment variables, unset unwanted environment variables, and set environment variables depending on your operating system.

Linux or macOS

Set an environment variable for the current session

export SOME_VARIABLE=some-value

Unset an environment variable

unset SOME_VARIABLE

echo will print nothing after unset:

echo $SOME_VARIABLE

See all the currently set environment variables

Print all env vars:

env

Print environment variables with proxy (case insensitive) in the name:

env | grep -i proxy

Windows

Setting environment variables in Windows is different depending on if you're using command prompt or PowerShell.

Set an environment variable for current session

Command prompt:

set SOME_VARIABLE=some-value

PowerShell:

$env:SOME_VARIABLE = "some-value"

Set environment variable globally for all future sessions

setx SOME_VARIABLE some-value

Unset an environment variable in the current session

Command prompt:

set SOME_VARIABLE=

PowerShell:

Remove-Item Env:\SOME_VARIABLE

See all currently set environment variables

Command prompt:

set

PowerShell:

Get-ChildItem Env:

View proxy settings in Cypress

Your current proxy settings can be viewed from within Cypress. Follow these steps:

Open up your project in Cypress via cypress open.
Click the "Settings" tab.
Click the "Proxy Settings" section to expand it and view the proxy settings that Cypress is currently using.