Building the Cypress binary

Canonical reference: guides/building-release-artifacts.md (npm .tgz vs binary .zip, CI context).

Artifact debugging (packaged CLI, CYPRESS_RUN_BINARY, git debug loop): debugging-cypress-artifacts.

Agent execution

Run from repo root with Yarn 1 and Node per .node-version. Request network for yarn / yarn lerna …; request all for yarn binary-build and yarn binary-package (long runs, temp dir under OS tmp, high memory). Sandbox vs full permissions does not fix a failed dist smoke test if ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE=1 is set — unset that var instead (below). Do not ask the user to approve each command separately during one build session.

Prerequisites: If node_modules/.bin/lerna or rollup is missing, run yarn first (postinstall runs the monorepo build; may take several minutes).

Agent hosts: Prefix binary commands with env -u ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE (or export env -u ELECTRON_RUN_AS_NODE for the shell session). Cursor/Electron environments often set this to 1, which is unrelated to sandboxing.

Commands (from repo root)

Use Yarn 1 and the Node version in .node-version.