Can you run Cypress in parallel without Cypress Cloud?

Question

Cloud is pricey. Team asks if we can shard purely on GitHub Actions.

Carlos Mendes · Accepted Answer

Cypress open-source has no built-in orchestration, but you can still parallelise by sharding specs yourself in CI.

```yaml
strategy:
  fail-fast: false
  matrix:
    shard: [1, 2, 3]
steps:
  - run: npx cypress run --spec "$(node scripts/split-specs.js ${{ matrix.shard }} 3)"
```

Your `split-specs.js` just globs the spec files, sorts them, and returns every Nth file for the shard — round-robin by file count is fine, sorting by last known duration is better. Alternatives that need no custom code: `cypress-split` (free plugin, splits by timings automatically) or `sorry-cypress`, a self-hosted drop-in for the Cypress Cloud dashboard that gives you real load-balanced parallelisation plus a report UI. Only Cypress Cloud's paid `--parallel` flag does orchestration natively; the flag is a no-op without a record key.

strategy:
  fail-fast: false
  matrix:
    containers: [1, 2, 3, 4]
steps:
  - uses: cypress-io/github-action@v6
    with:
      record: false
      parallel: false
      spec: cypress/e2e/**/*.cy.ts
      config: video=false
    env:
      SPLIT: 4
      SPLIT_INDEX: ${{ matrix.containers }}

Can you run Cypress in parallel without Cypress Cloud?

1 answer