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Getting Started

Create Nest Application​

The first thing we will do is install the Nest CLI tool:

npm i -g @nestjs/cli

Next, use the CLI to create a new application:

nest new server

When prompted, select NPM as your package manager.

Go into the newly created server directory and install Cypress and the plugin:

npm i -D cypress cypress-plugin-api

Next, open the project in your code editor (we'll be using VS Code in the tutorial):

code .

Configure Cypress​

Before we start working on the API, let's get Cypress up and running and write our first test. The test won't pass yet, but that's okay.

Launch Cypress:

npx cypress open

Select End-to-End testing, and go through the next few steps. Cypress will configure your project by creating all the files necessary for it to run. While we won't be doing end-to-end testing exactly, it's the most appropriate place to do API testing.

After the setup is done, update the cypress.config.ts file to add the baseUrl option. We'll set it to "http://localhost:3000", which is what our Nest application will serve the API locally during development.

cypress.config.ts
e2e: {
  baseUrl: 'http://localhost:3000',
  setupNodeEvents(on, config) {
    // implement node event listeners here
  },
},

While we are at it, we will import the cypress-plugin-api package into the cypress/support/e2e.ts so it is available to use in our specs. Throw the following towards the top of the file with any other imports:

cypress/support/e2e.ts
import "cypress-plugin-api";

If you go back to Cypress, you'll see a warning that it can't verify the server is running. This hints that we still need to start up our server. Let's go ahead and do so:

npm run start:dev
info

You will likely need to open several command windows or tabs to run Cypress and Nest simultaneously. In VS Code, I like to run Nest in a JavaScript Debug Terminal, which will attach the debugger to the process automatically.

Go back to Cypress, and hit the "try again" button on the section that warned us about the server not running. It should go away, and you can hit "Start E2E Testing".

Hit the "Create new empty spec" button, name the spec missions.cy.ts, and run it. This will create a default spec that visits a test site, but we'll soon update it to contain all the tests we write for the missions API.