The Difference Between Stub and Intercept

The difference between cy.stub and cy.intercept is that:

• cy.stub can be used for stubbing functions to record their usage, or control their behavior.
• cy.intercept can be used for intercepting network requests to return mock values.

For example, to stub a method of an object, you can call the following in Cypress:

const user = {
    // Get method for getting a user based on an ID
    get(id) { ... }
};

cy.stub(user, 'get')
  .withArgs('age')
  .returns(30);

The above code example will stub the user.get method with an argument of age, and it forces the function to return 30. On the other hand, you can intercept network requests in the following way:

cy.intercept('/api', { fixtures: 'response.json' });

This will intercept any requests made to /api and forces it to respond with the contents of the response.json file.

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Resources:

• Official documentation for stub
• Official documentation for intercept