Running Features

There are several ways to run your features. This page lists the most common ones. Any of these techniques also lets you define common command line options in a cucumber.yml file.

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.

cucumber features --name "Failed login"

…will run the scenario(s) named “Failed login”

cucumber --require features features/authentication/authenticate_user.feature

…will run authenticate_user feature. Any feature that is located inside a sub-directory of features directory must require features. Note: you can also add this to your cucumber.yml.

You can also use tags to specify what to run, or pass Environment Variables to Cucumber.

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" # Any valid command line option can go here.
end

If you are using Ruby on Rails this task is defined for you already. For more information please see the detailed page about using rake.

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!