Chrome problems testing with Cypress

Questions
1

Following Cypress recommendations we use direct api calls to login in most of our tests - basically if it’s not explicitly testing the login UI we bypass it, it’s much faster that way and we tend to login rather a lot to ensure we have good role based test coverage.

Based on examples in threads like this one https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/4416, we have this login code:

cy.request({
  method: 'POST',
  url: `${OKTA_URL}/api/v1/authn`,
  body: {
    username,
    password,
    options: {
      warnBeforePasswordExpired: 'true',
    },
  },
})
  .then((resp) => {
    const sessionToken = resp.body.sessionToken
    const qs = {
      client_id: OKTA_CLIENT_ID,
      scope: 'openid',
      nonce: getRandomString(),
      state: 'test', // fyi state is used to link requests and responses, we don't care here
      code_challenge: 'test',
      redirect_uri: OKTA_REDIRECT_URI,
      response_type: 'id_token token',
      sessionToken: sessionToken,
    }

    cy.request({
      method: 'GET',
      url: `${OKTA_URL}oauth2/default/v1/authorize`,
      form: true,
      followRedirect: false,
      qs,
    }).then((respWithToken) => {
      const url = respWithToken.redirectedToUrl
      cy.visit(url).then(() => {
        cy.visit('/')
      })
    })
  })
  .then((res) => {
    Cypress.log({ message: `okta login success as ${username}` })
  })

And it works, or at least it works in Electron and Firefox.

In Chrome, it logs in, then the screen refreshes and we’re back at the okta login page.

I should add that the UI is using a pretty bar oidc-client implementation and not the okta-js pacakge if that’s relevant.

Any suggestions?

2

It’s disappointing that the project that I use for all of my personal development, auth0, has a nice blog post talking about how to solve this exact problem (https://auth0.com/blog/end-to-end-testing-with-cypress-and-auth0/), but if you search for the same from okta you just people who either abandoned Okta or abandoned Cypress.

3

are there any pointers as to what request fails in Chrome and how the response to the same request differs in Electron and Firefox?

4

Not a thing. Everything appears to be pretty much going along the same way until I end out back at the login page.

5

When/why is that screen refresh occurring and is there something on that page that is reliant on there being an Okta session in browser?