Developmentastic

  1. Cucumber Features In Subdirectories

    I’m working on a project where we’ve amassed a decent amount of Cucumber features. Dumping them in the root directory makes it difficult to find the feature you’re looking for and running related features is impossible.

    I’ve fooled with organizing my cucumber features in the past, but didn’t have much luck. Grouping related features into subdirectories was fine when running the entire suite, but running an individual feature failed because Cucumber doesn’t know to load step definitions from the parent directory. As I was looking through cucumber --help the other day, I happened to notice the --require flag.

    -r, --require LIBRARY|DIR
    Require files before executing the features.

    Running the following command was exactly what I needed.

    cucumber --require features features/users/sign_in.feature

    This tells Cucumber to load all .rb files under features/ which will find the step definitions and support files. To save some typing, I created an alias in ~/.bashrc.

    alias cuc='cucumber -r features'

    Where I’ve really enjoyed this setup is when running all related features. After touching a step definition, I’d like to run the features that depend on it quickly without running the entire suite. Now that’s as simple as:

    cuc features/users/*