Best practice Login with a dispence/callback

[ricardovanlaarhoven]

We are developing against a development api which is live. So we don't have to setup the api per developer.
Everyone talks to the same API. For this reason i would choose to login with a static user.
I've learned that a best practice is to login before each test, and create this login programatically, and not part of every test.
For login calls which result in a token in the response body this would be really easy. Except the login method we are using results in a simple ok/not ok. When the login is ok we have to redirect to the API and this one redirects back to the application.
In this redirect is a token in the fragment (127.0.0.1:8080/auth/callback#token=1234). This is the token we would need to use in every test.

Doing this programaticaly like in the video here https://docs.cypress.io/guides/getting-started/testing-your-app.html#Step-1-Start-your-server is possible. But it would take very long before each request.

There are a lot of possibilities. At first the login should be a seperated spec for testing everything about the login. But my question is how to login before every spec

• Doing the complete login before every request (takes very long)
• Somehow do the login call once and remember the token. (how could i do this? cypress resets the state every time, right?)
• Create a persistent token in the api and use that in every request
• Any other way i'm not thinking about?

[estefafdez]

I'm interested in this as well.