cucumber.yml

Cucumber lets you store and reuse commonly used cucumber command line arguments for a project in a cucumber.yml or cucumber.yaml file. This file must be in your current working directory, .config subdirectory config subdirectory of your current working directory.

Defining Profiles

# config/cucumber.yml
##YAML Template
---
html_report: --format progress --format html --out=features_report.html  
bvt: --tags @bvt

Defining a template requires a name and then the command-line options that you want to execute with this profile. The example above generates two profiles: the first, named html_report, with a list of command-line options that specify new output formats and a second, named bvt which executes all features and scenarios tagged with @bvt.

Executing Profiles

[user@system project] cucumber --profile html_report
[user@system project] cucumber -p bvt

The execution of a profile simply requires the use of the flag --profile or -p.

During execution you can also specify additional parameters alongside the profile.

[user@system project] cucumber --profile html_report --tags ~@wip

Even multiple profiles can be specified together. The following executes all the features and scenarios tagged as @bvt with the specified progress and html output.

[user@system project] cucumber -p html_report -p bvt

Default Profile

It is often the case that you will want to execute Cucumber with a particular profile a majority of the time. The Cucumber configuration file uses a default profile to provide this functionality. When you specify a default profile you are stating that Cucumber should apply this command-line options to an execution when you do not specify a profile.

Using the same example, perhaps we want the html_report profile to be our default execution.

# config/cucumber.yml
##YAML Template
---
default: --profile html_report --profile bvt
html_report: --format progress --format html --out=features_report.html
bvt: --tags @bvt

The default profile is a special profile that when present, is applied to the execution of Cucumber when you have not specified a profile.

[user@system project] cucumber

So now, by default, Cucumber is going to use both the bvt profile and html_report profile testing all features and scenarios tagged as @bvt with the progress output and html output.

Preprocessing with ERb

The cucumber.yml file is preprocessed by ERb; this allows you to use ruby code to generate values in the cucumber.yml file. So if you have several profiles with similar values you could do something like:

# config/cucumber.yml
##YAML Template
---
<% common = "--tags ~@wip --strict" %>
default: <%= common %> features  
html_report: <%= common %> --format html --out=features_report.html features  

Environment Variables

Environment Variables can be used in the profile argument list for a profile as you would normally specify one on the command-line.

# config/cucumber.yml
##YAML Template
# ie profile executes the browser features with Internet Explorer
---
default: --profile html_report --profile bvt
html_report: --format progress --format html --out=features_report.html
bvt: --tags @bvt
ie: BROWSER=IE

Autotest Profiles

Integration with Autotest uses two profiles autotest and autotest-all. These profiles should be reserved for that service.