Make an HTTP request.

Syntax

cy.request(url)
cy.request(url, body)
cy.request(method, url)
cy.request(method, url, body)
cy.request(options)

Usage

Correct Usage

cy.request('http://dev.local/seed')

Arguments

url (String)

The URL to make the request to.

If you provide a non fully qualified domain name (FQDN), Cypress will make its best guess as to which host you want cy.request() to use in the url.

1. If you make a cy.request() after visiting a page, Cypress assumes the url used for the cy.visit() is the host.

   cy.visit('http://localhost:8080/app')
   cy.request('users/1.json') //  url is  http://localhost:8080/users/1.json
   

2. If you make a cy.request() prior to visiting a page, Cypress uses the host configured as the baseUrl property inside of of your configuration file.

   // cypress.json
   {
    "baseUrl": "http://localhost:1234"
   }
   

   cy.request('seed/admin') // url is http://localhost:1234/seed/admin
   

3. If Cypress cannot determine the host it will throw an error.

body (String, Object)

A request body to be sent in the request. Cypress sets the Accepts request header and serializes the response body by the encoding option.

method (String)

Make a request using a specific method. If no method is defined, Cypress uses the GET method by default.

Supported methods include:

• GET
• POST
• PUT
• DELETE
• PATCH
• HEAD
• OPTIONS
• TRACE
• COPY
• LOCK
• MKCOL
• MOVE
• PURGE
• PROPFIND
• PROPPATCH
• UNLOCK
• REPORT
• MKACTIVITY
• CHECKOUT
• MERGE
• M-SEARCH
• NOTIFY
• SUBSCRIBE
• UNSUBSCRIBE
• SEARCH
• CONNECT

options (Object)

Pass in an options object to change the default behavior of cy.request().

Option	Default	Description
log	true	Displays the command in the Command log
url	null	The URL to make the request to
method	GET	The HTTP method to use in the request
auth	null	Adds Authorization headers. Accepts these options.
body	null	Body to send along with the request
failOnStatusCode	true	Whether to fail on response codes other than 2xx and 3xx
followRedirect	true	Whether to automatically follow redirects
form	false	Whether to convert the body values to url encoded content and set the x-www-form-urlencoded header
encoding	utf8	The encoding to be used when serializing the response body. The following encodings are supported: ascii, base64, binary, hex, latin1, utf8, utf-8, ucs2, ucs-2, utf16le, utf-16le
gzip	true	Whether to accept the gzip encoding
headers	null	Additional headers to send; Accepts object literal
qs	null	Query parameters to append to the url of the request
retryOnStatusCodeFailure	false	Whether Cypress should automatically retry status code errors under the hood. Cypress will retry a request up to 4 times if this is set to true.
retryOnNetworkFailure	true	Whether Cypress should automatically retry transient network errors under the hood. Cypress will retry a request up to 4 times if this is set to true.
timeout	responseTimeout	Time to wait for cy.request() to resolve before timing out

You can also set options for cy.request()‘s baseUrl and responseTimeout globally in configuration.

Yields

cy.request() yields the response as an object literal containing properties such as:

• status
• body
• headers
• duration

Examples

URL

Make a GET request

cy.request() is great for talking to an external endpoint before your tests to seed a database.

beforeEach(() => {
  cy.request('http://localhost:8080/db/seed')
})

Issue an HTTP request

Sometimes it’s quicker to test the contents of a page rather than cy.visit() and wait for the entire page and all of its resources to load.

cy.request('/admin').its('body').should('include', '<h1>Admin</h1>')

Method and URL

Send a DELETE request

cy.request('DELETE', 'http://localhost:8888/users/827')

Alias the request using .as()

cy.request('https://jsonplaceholder.cypress.io/comments').as('comments')

cy.get('@comments').should((response) => {
  expect(response.body).to.have.length(500)
  expect(response).to.have.property('headers')
  expect(response).to.have.property('duration')
})

Method, URL, and Body

Send a POST request with a JSON body

cy
  .request('POST', 'http://localhost:8888/users/admin', { name: 'Jane' })
  .then((response) => {
    // response.body is automatically serialized into JSON
    expect(response.body).to.have.property('name', 'Jane') // true
  })

Options

Request a page while disabling auto redirect

To test the redirection behavior of a login without a session, cy.request can be used to check the status and redirectedToUrl property.

The redirectedToUrl property is a special Cypress property that normalizes the URL the browser would normally follow during a redirect.

cy.request({
  url: '/dashboard',
  followRedirect: false // turn off following redirects
})
  .then((resp) => {
    // redirect status code is 302
    expect(resp.status).to.eq(302)
    expect(resp.redirectedToUrl).to.eq('http://localhost:8082/unauthorized')
  })

Download a PDF file

By passing the encoding: binary option, the response.body will be serialized binary content of the file. You can use this to access various file types via .request() like .pdf, .zip, or .doc files.

cy.request({
  url: 'http://localhost:8080/some-document.pdf',
  encoding: 'binary',
})
.then((response) => {
  cy.writeFile('path/to/save/document.pdf', response.body, 'binary')
})

Get Data URL of an image

By passing the encoding: base64 option, the response.body will be base64-encoded content of the image. You can use this to construct a Data URI for use elsewhere.

cy.request({
  url: 'https://docs.cypress.io/img/logo.png',
  encoding: 'base64',
})
.then((response) => {
  const base64Content = response.body
  const mime = response.headers['content-type'] // or 'image/png'
  // see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Basics_of_HTTP/Data_URIs
  const imageDataUrl = `data:${mime};base64,${base64Content}`
})

HTML form submissions using form option

Oftentimes, once you have a proper e2e test around logging in, there’s no reason to continue to cy.visit() the login and wait for the entire page to load all associated resources before running any other commands. Doing so can slow down our entire test suite.

Using cy.request(), we can bypass all of this because it automatically gets and sets cookies as if the requests had come from the browser.

cy.request({
  method: 'POST',
  url: '/login_with_form', // baseUrl is prepended to url
  form: true, // indicates the body should be form urlencoded and sets Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded headers
  body: {
    username: 'jane.lane',
    password: 'password123'
  }
})

// to prove we have a session
cy.getCookie('cypress-session-cookie').should('exist')

Using cy.request() for HTML Forms

Check out our example recipe using cy.request() for HTML web forms

Request Polling

Call cy.request() over and over again

This is useful when you’re polling a server for a response that may take awhile to complete.

All we’re really doing here is creating a recursive function. Nothing more complicated than that.

// a regular ol' function folks
function req () {
  cy
    .request(...)
    .then((resp) => {
      // if we got what we wanted

      if (resp.status === 200 && resp.body.ok === true)
        // break out of the recursive loop
        return

      // else recurse
      req()
    })
}

cy
  // do the thing causing the side effect
  .get('button').click()

  // now start the requests
  .then(req)

Notes

Debugging

Request is not displayed in the Network Tab of Developer Tools

Cypress does not actually make an XHR request from the browser. We are actually making the HTTP request from the Cypress Test Runner (in Node). So, you won’t see the request inside of your Developer Tools.

CORS

CORS is bypassed

Normally when the browser detects a cross-origin HTTP request, it will send an OPTIONS preflight check to ensure the server allows cross-origin requests, but cy.request() bypasses CORS entirely.

// we can make requests to any external server, no problem.
cy.request('https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=cypress.io+cors')
  .its('body').should('include', 'Testing, the way it should be') // true

Cookies

Cookies are automatically sent and received

Before sending the HTTP request, we automatically attach cookies that would have otherwise been attached had the request come from the browser. Additionally, if a response has a Set-Cookie header, these are automatically set back on the browser cookies.

In other words, cy.request() transparently performs all of the underlying functions as if it came from the browser.

cy.server() and cy.route()

cy.request() sends requests to actual endpoints, bypassing those defined using cy.route()

cy.server() and any configuration passed to cy.server() has no effect on cy.request().

The intention of cy.request() is to be used for checking endpoints on an actual, running server without having to start the front end application.

Rules

Requirements

• cy.request() requires being chained off of cy.

• cy.request() requires that the server send a response.

• cy.request() requires that the response status code be 2xx or 3xx when failOnStatusCode is true.

Assertions

• cy.request() will only run assertions you've chained once, and will not retry.

Timeouts

• cy.request() can time out waiting for the server to respond.

Command Log

Request comments endpoint and test response

cy.request('https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/comments').then((response) => {
  expect(response.status).to.eq(200)
  expect(response.body).to.have.length(500)
  expect(response).to.have.property('headers')
  expect(response).to.have.property('duration')
})

The commands above will display in the Command Log as:

When clicking on request within the command log, the console outputs the following:

History

Version	Changes
4.7.0	Added support for encoding option.
3.3.0	Added support for options retryOnStatusCodeFailure and retryOnNetworkFailure.
3.2.0	Added support for any valid HTTP method argument including TRACE, COPY, LOCK, MKCOL, MOVE, PURGE, PROPFIND, PROPPATCH, UNLOCK, REPORT, MKACTIVITY, CHECKOUT, MERGE, M-SEARCH, NOTIFY, SUBSCRIBE, UNSUBSCRIBE, SEARCH, and CONNECT.

See also

• cy.exec()
• cy.task()
• cy.visit()
• Recipe: Logging In - Single Sign on
• Recipe: Logging In - HTML Web Form
• Recipe: Logging In - XHR Web Form
• Recipe: Logging In - CSRF Tokens