The Requirement

I recently was tasked with finding a way to skip authentication to easily test our apps using the great End to End testing tool Cypress. Cypress does provide simple solutions for testing your app's authentication and authorization but in our scenario, we just wanted to skip it altogether.

Some Context

In our case, we wanted to use an in-house npm package that handles the authentication logic. All we need to do is just import that module into our app.module with an environment-specific identity configuration.

With Authentication

  @NgModule({
    imports: [InHouseIdentityModule.forRoot(environment.identityConfig)]
  })
  export class AppModule {}

Without Authentication

  @NgModule({
    imports: [InHouseIdentityModule.forRoot(null)]
  })
  export class AppModule {}

As you can see above, if null is passed into the InHouseIdentityModule.forRoot() method, it will skip authentication for our app.

Creating e2e Environment

The first thing we need to do is create a new environment. We will create an environment.e2e.ts to go inside the /environments directory with the rest of our environment configurations. We should then copy any app-specific configurations needed in addition to adding identityConfig equal to null. It should look something like this...

  export const environment: IEnvironment = {
    // your other app configurations
    identityConfig: null
  };

This will make sure that when the e2e configuration is used that null is passed into the identityModule and therefore skipping authentication.

The next thing we need to do is configure angular.json to build our e2e configuration.

  {
    "projects": {
      "appName": {
        "architect": {
          "build": {
            "configuration": {
              "e2e": {
                "fileReplacements": [
                  {
                    "replace": "src/environments/environment.ts",
                    "with": "src/environments/environment.e2e.ts"
                  }
                ]
              }
            }
          },
          "serve": {
            "configurations": {
              "e2e" {
                "browserTarget": "auto:build:e2e"
              }
            }
          }
        }
      }
    }
  }

Here we are telling angular to replace environment.ts with environment.e2e.ts when using the build configuration e2e. We then tell angular that when we serve the app with the e2e configuration, it will target the e2e build.

Finally, let's create a script in our package.json to easily build and serve our app using the new e2e configuration.

  {
    "scripts": {
      "start:e2e": "ng serve --configuration=\"e2e\"",
      "build:e2e": "ng build --configuration=\"e2e\""
    }
  }

Now if we run our app by using npm run start:e2e the app will serve and it will skip authentication!

BONUS
If you need to be able to run cypress headlessly in your CI pipeline, you can add the following script to your package.json:

"cypress:ci": "start-server-and-test start:e2e http-get://localhost:4200 cypress:run",