Cypress: Disable video recording on cypress run

[ianwalter]

Current behavior:

Video recorded on every cypress run.

Desired behavior:

CLI and/or config option to disable video recording on cypress run.

How to reproduce:

Run cypress run. See "Started video recording" message and generated video file in cypress/videos.

Additional Info (images, stack traces, etc)

I'm not using the videos while developing and I'd rather save the time/processing and lower my chances of running into associated bugs by disabling this functionality altogether when I need to run all tests.

[MarcLoupias]

You can already disable video recording with proper configuration in your cypress.json file (doc) : "video": false.

You can also do it with CLI by overriding your cypress.json.

Edited by @jennifer-shehane to update key videoRecording to new version 3 key video

[ianwalter]

@MarcLoupias Thanks! Not sure how I missed that.

[PascalPrecht]

Thanks everyone for this issue as I ran into it as well. However, I do have some thoughts here on usability (but maybe my expectations are wrong):

• I read in the CLI docs that --record specifies "whether to record the test run". With that in mind, I'd expect it to not record the test run with --record is not passed as an option, or, at least let me disable it a la cypress run --record false.

Doing it via config override totally does the trick, it's just less comfortable and to be honest, I didn't run into the overriding docs when searching for such a feature. Frankly I didn't actually search for "overriding config" but rather "how do disable video recording in cypress run".

Again, my expectations may be wrong here. I'm just leaving it here as feedback :)

[brian-mann]

@PascalPrecht There's another issue open that talks about how "recording" and "video recording" is confusing nomenclature.

What it's really saying is two different things. --record is about recording the run details on our Dashboard Service to which you'd have to setup your project to record and explicitly opt in.

By default Cypress takes a video of the run without any flags -- thats the video recording feature. You can turn that off with configuration or CLI flags. --config videoRecording=false

[bahmutov]

The --record is for recording test results _on the dashboard_. Which is separate from video recording for example. The way I usually set this up (because I don't want to record video locally when testing)

• disable video recording in the cypress.json
• use simple test: cypress run script in the package.json file
• on CI do npm test -- --record and set CYPRESS_RECORD_KEY=<private record key> environment variable _and_ CYPRESS_VIDEO_RECORDING=1 to enable video recording on CI

[bahmutov]

hahaha @brian-mann we posted together!

[brian-mann]

@PascalPrecht here's the other issue for reference https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/562

[PascalPrecht]

Thanks for the clarification! This all makes total sense. I assume tho then, that this has potential for improvement. Not sure if I'm the only one who got confused by this.

[johannordin]

videoRecording is now renamed to video (if someone stumbles upon this issue)

[aries1980]

For the “record”, it is still videoRecording in 3.0.1 .

[jennifer-shehane]

Hey @aries1980, what key are you referring to? Where are you using the videoRecording key in 3.0.1?

If you were to use the videoRecording key in your configuration in Cypress version 3.0+, you should see this error:

A configuration option you have supplied has been renamed.

Please rename videoRecording to video

[kud]

It's still videoRecording in the doc: https://docs.cypress.io/guides/core-concepts/screenshots-and-videos.html#Videos

[jennifer-shehane]

I created a new issue in our docs to document the incorrect key reference here: https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress-documentation/issues/1030. Our documentation is open source and contributions are welcome. 😄

[kud]

Thank you. @jennifer-shehane :)

[johnjensenish]

cypress run --config video=false