Cypress 5.0 - Unable to find installed browsers

Question

I have Cypress 5.0 installed and have all the browsers - Chrome, Edge and FF. When I run

> npx cypress open

Not able to see all the browsers on the top right corner. Only Electron is showing

I tried

> npx cypress open --browser chrome

I get the following error

Can't run because you've entered an invalid browser name.                         
                                                                                  
Browser: 'chrome' was not found on your system or is not supported by Cypress.    
                                                                                  
Cypress supports the following browsers:                                          
- chrome                                                                          
- chromium                                                                        
- edge                                                                            
- electron                                                                        
- firefox (Cypress support in beta)                                               
                                                                                  
You can also use a custom browser: https://on.cypress.io/customize-browsers       
                                                                                  
Available browsers found on your system are:                                      
- electron                                                                        
                                                                              

I also tried

> npx cypress open --browser C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe

Cypress shows the error - We could not identify a known browser at the path you provided

One of my other machine, I am able to see all the browsers from get go.

Any help will be appreciated

Answer 1

I have faced similar issue in my organization and Symlink helped me to handle that. In my scenario the chrome brower was not installed in default folder where cypress looks for Chrome.exe ('C:/Program Files (x86)/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe','C:/Program Files/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe')

When I tried below command with my installed chrome brower path:

 npx cypress open --browser "C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe"

It fails with error that unable to find browser at "C:\Program". It seems its splitting the --browser path with SPACE and fails to indentify the chrome browser.

So I created a symlink at default folder where cypress looks for chrome browser by default.

C:\mklink /J "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application" "C:\Program Files \Google Chrome (Local)"

Post completion of the Symlink I can see new path "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application" takes me to chrome.exe. Now I can run the cypess open command without browser tag and should see the chrome browser added in browser dropdown.

npx cypress open

Note:

1. Run the cmd as administrator
2. Make sure the "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome" folder exist prior running the symlink command