Case Study: Gatsby achieves faster, more reliable open-source contributions with Cypress

Gatsby accepts more open-source contributions than ever before with Cypress E2E testing

Gatsby, the open-source site generator, faced slow, error-prone contribution workflows as hundreds of pull requests arrived each month and maintainers struggled to merge confidently. To scale testing and catch bugs earlier, Gatsby adopted Cypress for browser-based end-to-end (E2E) testing (integrated with CircleCI), replacing fragile manual checks and less suitable tools like Puppeteer and Selenium.

By building a robust Cypress E2E suite, Gatsby now catches regressions at PR time, speeds reviews, and ships features more often: 616 pull requests were merged in August 2019 and the cumulative age of open PRs dropped by 54%. Cypress’s instant feedback, browser-level accuracy, and CI reliability increased developer and contributor confidence, made E2E tests the core of Gatsby’s workflow, and enabled measurable improvements in throughput and quality.

Gatsby

Dustin Schau

Software Engineer