Running Features

There are several ways to run your features. This page lists the most common ones.

Using the Gem’s ‘cucumber’ Command

Assuming you’ve installed cucumber as a gem, run this at a command prompt to see the options for running features:

cucumber --help

For example

cucumber features/authenticate_user.feature:44 --format html > features.html

…will run the scenario defined at line 44 of the authenticate_user feature, format it as HTML and pipe it to the features.html file for viewing in a browser.

Defining ‘profiles’

Profiles allow you to store and reuse commonly used cucumber arguments for a project in a cucumber.yml file. For example, by having this in your cucumber.yml at your project root:

default: --format profile features
html_report: --format progress --format html --out=features_report.html features  

You can reuse the arguments listed above:

cucumber --profile html_report

It is important to point out that by simply running ‘cucumber’ the default profile will be used (if a cucumber.yml file is found in the current directory).

Using Rake

From the command line:

rake features

This requires a Rakefile with a Cucumber task definition. For example:

require 'rubygems'
require 'cucumber/rake/task'

Cucumber::Rake::Task.new(:features) do |t|
  t.cucumber_opts = "--format pretty"
end

If you are using Ruby on Rails this task is defined for you already.

Using TextMate

See the Cucumber.tmbundle documentation

Using RCov

How to use Cucumber with RCov

Using other build tools

Maven and Ant are described in JRuby and Java. MSBuild and Nant should be under IronRuby and .NET. Anything else – please contribute to this wiki!