Invalid string length

Comienza rastreando la instancia Step a través de safeSerialize() y luego hasta el Encoder.encodeAsString de socket.io-parser, utilizando los rangos de maxDepth indicados para reproducir el comportamiento. Comprueba el escenario I.amOnPage("https://github.com") en CodeceptUI y confirma que la serialización ya no provoca Invalid string length, mientras que la salida de finalización o fallo visual se sigue entregando.

Using a fresh installation of codeceptjs (v3.7.7) and @codeceptjs/ui (v1.3.8), when running a Hello World test (using both TypeScript and JavaScript, and both plain JS-driven scenario and Gherkin scenario), the UI keeps spinning endlessly, while giving me the following output in the terminal during the first I.amOnPage() statement (using https://github.com for this test purpose):

🌟 CodeceptUI started!
👉 Open http://localhost:3333 to see CodeceptUI in a browser


Unhandled rejection
Unhandled rejection
Application window opened, switch to it to run tests...
HTML Reporter: Starting HTML report generation...
CodeceptJS v3.7.7 #StandWithUkraine
Using test root "/path/to/tests"

Hello World --
    As a Developer
    I want to test Codecept.js with Gherkin
    So I can make sure it will work for subsequent features
Unhandled rejection
Unhandled rejection
  ✖ Login page in 22208ms

-- FAILURES:

  1) Hello World
       Login page:
     
  Invalid string length                                                                                                                                                                             
  RangeError:                                                                                                                                                                                       
      at JSON.stringify (<anonymous>)                                                                                                                                                               
      at Encoder.encodeAsString (node_modules/.pnpm/socket.io-parser@4.2.6/node_modules/socket.io-parser/build/cjs/index.js:93:25)                                                                  
                                                                                                                                                                                                    
                                                                                                                                                                                                    
  ◯ File: file:///path/to/tests/features/hello.feature
  
  ◯ Scenario Steps:
  ✖ I.amOnPage("https://github.com") at ./definitions/steps.ts:12:7
  
  
  ◯ Metadata:
  - browser: chromium
  - browserVersion: 145.0.7632.6
  - windowSize: 1280x720


  FAIL  | 0 passed, 1 failed   // 23s
Run with --verbose flag to see complete NodeJS stacktrace
***************************************
nodeInfo:  24.10.0
osInfo:  macOS 26.3
cpuInfo:  (14) arm64 Apple M4 Pro
chromeInfo:  146.0.7680.153
edgeInfo:  Not Found
firefoxInfo:  Not Found
safariInfo:  26.3
playwrightBrowsers:  "chromium: 145.0.7632.6, firefox: 146.0.1, webkit: 26.0"
If you need more detailed info, just run this: npx codeceptjs info
***************************************
HTML Report saved to: /path/to/tests/output/report.html

The actual code being executed is the following, in any case:

Feature('Hello World');

Scenario('Hello', ({ I }) => {
  I.amOnPage('https://github.com');
  I.see('GitHub');
});

I started the debugger and saw a Step instance being safeSerialize(), leading to the issue. I tried changing the maxDepth default argument value. The following lead to those results:

This was attempted with Node.js 20 and 24.

My best guess is we have some deep copies of certain large objects being serialized, I haven't investigated more into the issue. Happy to help reproduce and debug with whoever wants to give this a shot!