End-to-end testing overview

Automated testing with Kinde authentication helps ensure your application’s authentication flows work reliably. You can test backend APIs, UI authentication flows, and authenticated features using different approaches depending on what you need to validate.

Testing approaches

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Kinde supports three main testing approaches:

• Authentication flow testing: Test sign-up, sign-in, and sign-out flows using browser automation tools with both password and passwordless flows.
• Authenticated feature testing: Test protected routes and features after authentication using saved session state.
• Backend API testing: Test protected API endpoints using refresh tokens for long-running authenticated sessions.

Each approach has its own overview guide with detailed implementation steps and examples for various browser automation tools:

• Testing authenticated features - Learn how to save authentication state and test protected features efficiently
• Testing authentication flows - Test sign-up, sign-in, and sign-out flows
• Testing backend APIs - Test protected API endpoints with refresh tokens

Limitations

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Some authentication flows have testing limitations:

• Social provider flows: Automated testing of Google, GitHub, or other social sign-in flows is not directly supported due to third-party provider restrictions
• MFA flows: Testing multi-factor authentication may require manual intervention
• Enterprise SSO flows: Testing SAML/SSO enterprise connections requires coordination with identity providers

For these use cases, consider manual testing or staging environments with test identity providers.

Getting started

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Before you start testing, you need to set up your test infrastructure:

Setup test user and environment - Create test users, configure test applications, and set up isolated test environments. This setup is required for all testing methods.