Wayland support on Linux

[switchyrascal]

What would you like?

It would be great to have Cypress run natively with Wayland (npx cypress open) instead of using xfvb/X11/Xwayland.

Why is this needed?

This is required for HiDPI monitors and fractional scaling on Linux machines. This is currently only supported with Wayland for Linux, and running Cypress with Xwayland leads to a very blurry experience on a 4K monitor.

Other

Here's a screenshot attempting to show the issue, top right is a FF window under Wayland which has crisper text, the other two Cypress windows are running under Xwayland and are blurry.

[rootsher]

After installing a new version of the system (Ubuntu), I debugged the problem of firing Cypress (white screen on very early cypress loading stage) for about two weeks. Starting from Docker networking issues, to a GPU hardware acceleration problem, to a Linux switch from X server to Wayland. I believe this issue will finally be resolved by the Cypress team. However, for those who have reached this place - the temporary solution is to disable Wayland. To do this, uncomment the line #WaylandEnable=false in the /etc/gdm3/custom.conf file and reboot the machine.

[t-moe]

Can you elaborate a bit what pieces are missing?
We have a custom build of chromium here, running with wayland on arm64. It would be nice if we could point cypress to use this browser.

---

I've tried to start it like this: cypress run --browser /usr/bin/chromium --headed --config-file ./cypress/config/test.config.ts.
I've patched the cli to skip the verify process. But now it seems to hang inside of /root/.cache/Cypress/10.7.0/Cypress/Cypress --no-sandbox -- --run-project /home/testuser --headed --browser /usr/bin/chromium. I suspect this is the electron starter app that doesn't work with Wayland yet.
Is there a way to skip the electron starter app and directly launch the browser in question?

[gammons]

if it's chromium, using the --ozone-platform=wayland should do the trick. You can specify that as a flag, or put it into your ~/.config/chrome-flags.conf file.

[switchyrascal]

When starting cypress, the initial testing-types-runner window also launches under Xwayland since it's an Electron app. So, if testing with Firefox, running xlsclients lists both 'Cypress' and 'firefox'; this is the problem that this issue is really about, since it should not be necessary to use Xwayland for any runner/browser combo at this point in time.

When cypress launches, it ends up spawning a binary and passes arguments to it, some of those arguments are for Electron. So the fix for this issue can be made with one line, which will stop both the runner and browser from launching under Xwayland, and maybe fix all browsers. In the lib/exec/spawn.js file, an addition of the --ozone-platform=wayland option to the Electron args seems to work. At around line 109, change this:

        const electronArgs = [];

To this:

        const electronArgs = ['--ozone-platform=wayland'];

With this change xlsclients does not list any Cypress process, and the browsers are also launched correctly under Wayland. Maybe this can probably be done with config files too, but I didn't look in to that.

Edit: changed where to add flag for simplicity.

[gammons]

The right flag actually might be this: --ozone-platform-hint=auto ¹ - that would probably account for folks using X and Wayland together. I'm honestly not sure why it isn't the default in chromium

Footnotes

1. https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/wayland ↩

[switchyrascal]

I tested --ozone-platform-hint=auto with Cypress 13.7, i.e. added const electronArgs = ['--ozone-platform-hint=auto']; to lib/exec/spawn.js:109, and it works for the runner and browser as well, so is a likely a better solution.

[MarianoFranzese]

I tested --ozone-platform-hint=auto with Cypress 13.7, i.e. added const electronArgs = ['--ozone-platform-hint=auto']; to lib/exec/spawn.js:109, and it works for the runner and browser as well, so is a likely a better solution.

is there a way to do this using cypress in a container?

[jennifer-shehane]

Reopening as we had to revert this PR due to failing when running on our linux inary

[AtofStryker]

I have a PR that is going to attempt to build the binary with ozone-platform-hint. I have also updated the issue and unlocked it (just noticed cypress bot locked it last week unintentionally)

[AtofStryker]

I have binaries built for the update. @azvyae or anyone else able to verify they work with wayland? f0a7e2a. Looks like @switchyrascal confirms this works as well

[cypress-bot]

Released in 13.14.0.

This comment thread has been locked. If you are still experiencing this issue after upgrading to
Cypress v13.14.0, please open a new issue.

[jennifer-shehane]

Unfortunately we had to back out this change as it was causing some issue for users in Ubuntu that were preventing running Cypress. PR to back out: #30179

We will not have Wayland support in Cypress 13.14.1 and would have to re-evalute how to address this more broadly. This is not currently on our roadmap of work however.