Cypress is failing with RangeError: Invalid time value

[rix0rrr]

Current behavior

On our project, most Cypress tests are now failing with the following errror:

Invalid time value
RangeError: Invalid time value
    at Date.toISOString (<anonymous>)
    at <embedded>:3215:1043369
    at a (<embedded>:3215:1043436)
    at <embedded>:3215:1046964
    at Array.forEach (<anonymous>)
    at <embedded>:3215:1046921
    at <embedded>:3215:1046982
    at ChildProcess.exithandler (node:child_process:399:7)
    at ChildProcess.emit (node:events:527:28)
    at maybeClose (node:internal/child_process:1092:16)
    at Socket.<anonymous> (node:internal/child_process:451:11)
    at Socket.emit (node:events:527:28)
    at Pipe.<anonymous> (node:net:709:12)

After printing this error, the test runner fully stops; it doesn't seem to be something in the test itself, but something about the runner.

As you can see from https://github.com/hedyorg/hedy/actions/workflows/cypresstests.yml, the tests started failing pretty consistently for us between 2024-12-16 and 2024-12-17.

Triggering incident: GitHub image update to Ubuntu 24.04 ?

This seems to correlate with a new Ubuntu image rollout from GitHub. The jobs that recently succeeded ran on:

  Image: ubuntu-22.04
  Version: 20241211.1.0
  Included Software: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/ubuntu22/20241211.1/images/ubuntu/Ubuntu2204-Readme.md
  Image Release: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/releases/tag/ubuntu22%2F20241211.1

The jobs that recently failed ran on:

Image: ubuntu-24.04
  Version: 20241208.1.0
  Included Software: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/blob/ubuntu24/20241208.1/images/ubuntu/Ubuntu2404-Readme.md
  Image Release: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/releases/tag/ubuntu24%2F20241208.1

A race condition?

Not all runs on Ubuntu 24.04 failed. From around 23 job runs on Ubuntu 24.04, 20 failed and 3 succeeded. It seems to be some sort of race condition. The last thing the runner printed before throwing the error is a test file header:

  Running:  admin_page/user_overview/visible_attributes_checkboxes.cy.js                   (5 of 63)
  Estimated: 7 seconds

The file that it prints is different every time -- so there are some runs in which the failure apparently doesn't happen at all. The larger the test suite is, the less likely the race condition doesn't happen.

Desired behavior

The desired behavior should be that the tests do complete :)

Test code to reproduce

I don't know how to reproduce this, but it seems to happen quite consistenly for us on GitHub's Ubuntu 24.04 image.

Cypress Version

13.1.0

Node version

v20.18.0

Operating System

Ubuntu 24.04

Debug Logs

No response

Other

No response

[rix0rrr]

I notice we were not using the latest Cypress version. I'm upgrading to 13.17.0 and running again to confirm.

[rix0rrr]

Well whatever you did somewhere in the 13.x line seems to fix it, so I guess we can close this.

[MikeMcC399]

@rix0rrr

• This issue was reported also under "RangeError: Invalid time value" while upgrading to Debian 12 #27869 and like you, the user found that upgrading Cypress solved the issue.