Waiting for an HTTP Service in GitLab CI/CD

Last weekend, I was setting up a Cypress test pipeline in GitLab for Toph for the 5th time.

I have no idea why this pipeline keeps breaking over time. It’s like bread left in the open. Cypress is such a fantastic end-to-end testing tool. But it seems to need a lot of extra love.

Something that I needed to do was, in the CI/CD script, wait for Toph to start handling HTTP requests before starting Cypress.

Take the following as an example:

• Start ./server in the background
• Wait for ./server to start handling HTTP requests
• Run Cypress tests

In the case of Toph, I could have added a sleep 1 after starting Toph’s web server and called it a day.

But it didn’t sit right with me. If the start-up time increases in the future or due to external reasons, the test will fail.

Instead, I added a one-liner in the GitLab CI/CD script that uses until and curl to wait for Toph to start handling HTTP requests.

For the example above, it would look like this:

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test:cypress:
  script:
  - "./server &"
  - until $(curl --output /dev/null --silent --head --fail http://localhost:5000/api/ping); do printf '.'; sleep 1; done
  - npx cypress run --browser firefox

The second line in the script will block until curl receives an HTTP response from http://localhost:5000/api/ping.

This post is 81st of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.