Technical requirements
Cypress can be installed as a standalone application on your computer and can be run on a machine that has at least 2 GB of RAM and that meets any of the following operating system requirements:
- macOS 10.9 and above (64-bit only)
- Linux Ubuntu 12.04 and above, Fedora 21, and Debian 8 (64-bit only)
- Windows 7 and above
In order to use Cypress on one of the operating systems listed here, Node.js 8 or above must be installed first. Node.js is a JavaScript runtime environment that allows JavaScript code to be run outside the browser. Installing Node.js installs npm, which allows us to install JavaScript packages from https://www.npmjs.com/. npm is the default package manager for Node.js, and users can either use it or use third-party package managers such as Yarn. In this section, we will install Cypress on both macOS and Windows operating systems.