Binary vs NPM .bin

[guyisra]

Doing npm install/yarn on a package.json where cypress exists installs cypress and its binary to the node_modules/.bin folder

But when trying to yarn cypress run it says that the binary is not found/installed and need to do yarn cypress install which then downloads the binary, unzips it and places it in ~/.cache/3.8.1/Cypress

But then when running yarn cypress it outputs

It looks like you are running the Cypress binary directly.
This is not the recommended approach, and Cypress may not work correctly.
Please install the 'cypress' NPM package and follow the instructions here:
https://on.cypress.io/installing-cypress

Can you please clarify why I need both the downloaded binary and the npm binary and when I would use each?

[jennifer-shehane]

You should only need in include Cypress in your package.json (yarn add cypress) and run yarn (do not run both npm and yarn commands mixed together)

You are not meant to run the binary directly as stated in the error message and instead should just need to run yarn cypress run after a correct install.

Also make sure you have not inadvertently downloaded 2 versions of Cypress #4595 Or if the install got interupted, this may result in an incomplete binary install which can cause this issue. So, clean your node_modules and reinstall.

Run cypress verify to verify a correct installation.

[guyisra]

thanks, so when would I need the binary version?

[pravynandas]

Hi @guyisra, If I may answer from my experiences. The cypress npm package is a wrapper for the actual binary which gets installed in ~/.cache in linux and C:\Users<user>\AppData\Local\Cypress\Cache in windows.

But all we need to do for a proper install is 'yarn add cypress' OR 'npm install cypress' which will internally take care of installing the actual binaries to the corresponding cache folders and the npm wrapper binaries to the node_modules/cypress (and node_modules/.bin).

Most probably, as @jennifer-shehane pointed, combining npm and yarn in the same project could have corrupted the installation (simply because they work in their own way when it comes to handling packages installation and operation).

To start fresh, all we need to do is delete node_modules and package-lock.json and do a fresh yarn install (OR) npm install.

[jennifer-shehane]

Closing as resolved.

If you're experiencing a bug similar to this in Cypress, please open a new issue with a fully reproducible example that we can run. There may be a specific edge case with the issue that we need more detail to fix.