Cypress: Installing Cypress for every project I work on takes too much space

[nwwells]

• Operating System: Mac OS X
• Cypress Version: 1.0.3
• Browser Version: N/A

Is this a Feature or Bug?

Bug

Current behavior:

npm install cypress installs the Electron app for every project i do it on. It's heavy: 320MB. Which means that since I have it installed on 4 projects, almost a gig of disk space is wasted on an electron app duplicated 4 times :(

Desired behavior:

Make the primary method of installing the cypress app system or user global

How to reproduce:

npm install cypress

Test code:

du -hs node_modules/cypress/

Additional Info (images, stack traces, etc)

[bahmutov]

Could you install it globally (which means you are using same version, just like with any globally installed tool) and use it?

npm i -g cypress
cypress open

[nwwells]

Sorry I didn't respond quickly, I haven't had time to test this. But all the documentation suggests that installing per-project is correct. Even if I do install "globally", it will only be global per node version (I use nvm). I tried downloading the Cypress app, but wasn't clear on how to make it work, so I read the docs, which lead me to install per-project.

[bahmutov]

So even single global npm install is too much because there are multiple versions managed by NVM? You could potentially install cypress locally then copy the folder from Node modules into a global folder, create an alias and have a truly global tool. We highly not recommend this though because you are loosing versioning and have to do this on every box and CI provider!

Sent from my iPhone

On Nov 17, 2017, at 07:48, Nathan Wells [e-mail] wrote:

Sorry I didn't respond quickly, I haven't had time to test this. But all the documentation suggests that installing per-project is correct. Even if I do install "globally", it will only be global per node version (I use nvm). I tried downloading the Cypress app, but wasn't clear on how to make it work, so I read the docs, which lead me to install per-project.

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[brian-mann]

If you're on OSX you could just manually download and unzip into your ~/Applications folder. Then you'll always use it in global mode and not have it installed via npm at all. You'd lose access to the command line, but you could at least use it across all projects.

Really the only solution around this is to generate a "headless" version of Cypress without Electron bundled in - so no Desktop GUI and no Electron browser. This mode would work from the command line, but and would still get the browser launching + GUI interface in there. Everything would work the same. That's the long term answer IMO.

Right now its very much off topic for us so I wouldn't bet on this being done for awhile.

[nwwells]

A headless version sounds perfect. Should I open a separate issue for that? would you be open to a PR that allows a headless version?

[brian-mann]

Sure.