i think it would be

window.document.body

That's what I thought, but when I try that I get minimal output.

because you are in the spec window, you probably want the application's window and document

oh, gotcha. Ya, you would need to navigate up the parent chain, find the iframe, and then grab it. This worked for me but not sure if its reliable:

window.parent.document.getElementsByTagName('iFrame').item(0).contentDocument.body

. Cypress grabs a reference to the window in the AUT and makes it available in cy.window and cy.document. Is there a reason why you can't use those in a test?

I refactored it to use

cy.document()

but for a moment there I had a more readable way to do it in my head by declaring variables and composing them. This is for a utility function so I was less concerned about sticking to Cypress norms 🙂 Thanks for the answer!