This is the simplest possible build script setup for Cucumber using Java. There is nothing fancy like a webapp or browser testing. All this does is to show you how to install and run Cucumber!

There is a single feature file with one scenario. The scenario has three steps, two of them pending. See if you can make them all pass!

Git:

git clone https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-java-skeleton.git
cd cucumber-java-skeleton

Subversion:

svn checkout https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-java-skeleton/trunk cucumber-java-skeleton
cd cucumber-java-skeleton

Or simply download a zip file.

Open a command window and run:

mvn test

This runs Cucumber features using Cucumber's JUnit runner. The @RunWith(Cucumber.class) annotation on the RunCukesTest class tells JUnit to kick off Cucumber.

Open a command window and run:

ant download
ant runcukes

This runs Cucumber features using Cucumber's Command Line Interface (CLI) runner. Note that the RunCukesTest junit class is not used at all. If you remove it (and the cucumber-junit jar dependency), it will run just the same.

Open a command window and run:

gradlew test

This runs Cucumber features using Cucumber's JUnit runner. The @RunWith(Cucumber.class) annotation on the RunCukesTest class tells JUnit to kick off Cucumber.

The Cucumber runtime parses command line options to know what features to run, where the glue code lives, what plugins to use etc. When you use the JUnit runner, these options are generated from the @CucumberOptions annotation on your test.

Sometimes it can be useful to override these options without changing or recompiling the JUnit class. This can be done with the cucumber.options system property. The general form is:

Using Maven:

mvn -Dcucumber.options="..." test

Using Ant:

JAVA_OPTIONS='-Dcucumber.options="..."' ant runcukes

Using Gradle:

gradlew -Dcucumber.options="..." test

Let's look at some things you can do with cucumber.options. Try this:

-Dcucumber.options="--help"

That should list all the available options.

IMPORTANT

When you override options with -Dcucumber.options, you will completely override whatever options are hard-coded in your @CucumberOptions or in the script calling cucumber.api.cli.Main. There is one exception to this rule, and that is the --plugin option. This will not override, but add a plugin. The reason for this is to make it easier for 3rd party tools (such as Cucumber Pro) to automatically configure additional plugins by appending arguments to a cucumber.properties file.

Specify a particular scenario by line (and use the pretty plugin, which prints the scenario back)

-Dcucumber.options="classpath:skeleton/belly.feature:4 --plugin pretty"

This works because Maven puts ./src/test/resources on your classpath. You can also specify files to run by filesystem path:

-Dcucumber.options="src/test/resources/skeleton/belly.feature:4 --plugin pretty"

You can also specify what to run by tag:

-Dcucumber.options="--tags @bar --plugin pretty"

-Dcucumber.options="@target/rerun.txt"

This works as long as you have the rerun formatter enabled.

For example a JUnit formatter:

-Dcucumber.options="--plugin junit:target/cucumber-junit-report.xml"