Cucumber-Rails brings Cucumber to Rails 3.x and 4.x. For Rails 2.3.x support, see the rails-2.3.x branch.

Before you can use the generator, add the gem to your project's Gemfile as follows:

group :test do
  gem 'cucumber-rails', :require => false
  # database_cleaner is not required, but highly recommended
  gem 'database_cleaner'
end

Then install it by running:

bundle install

Learn about the various options:

rails generate cucumber:install --help

Finally, bootstrap your Rails app, for example:

rails generate cucumber:install

With Rake:

rake cucumber

Without Rake:

[bundle exec] cucumber

By default, cucumber-rails runs DatabaseCleaner.start and DatabaseCleaner.clean before and after your scenarios. You can disable this behaviour like so:

# features/support/env.rb
# ...
Cucumber::Rails::Database.autorun_database_cleaner = false

When upgrading from a previous version it is recommended that you rerun:

rails generate cucumber:install

The only way to have a bug fixed or a new feature accepted is to describe it with a Cucumber feature. Let's say you think you have found a bug in the cucumber:install generator. Fork this project, clone it to your workstation and check out a branch with a descriptive name:

git clone [email protected]:you/cucumber-rails.git
git checkout -b bug-install-generator

Start by making sure you can run the existing features. Now, create a feature that demonstrates what's wrong. See the existing features for examples. When you have a failing feature that reproduces the bug, commit, push and send a pull request. Someone from the Cucumber-Rails team will review it and hopefully create a fix.

If you know how to fix the bug yourself, make a second commit (after committing the failing feature) before you send the pull request.

I strongly recommend rvm and ruby 1.9.3. When you have that, cd into your cucumber-rails repository and:

gem install bundler
bundle install

With all dependencies installed, all specs and features should pass:

rake

One of the features uses MongoDB, which needs to be running in order to make features/mongoid.feature to pass.

In order to test against multiple versions of key dependencies, the Appraisal is used to generate multiple gemfiles, stored in the gemfiles/ directory. Normally these will only run on Travis; however, if you want to run the full test suite against all gemfiles, run the following commands:

rake gemfiles:install
rake test:all

To run the suite against a named gemfile, use the following:

rake test:gemfile[rails_3_0]

To remove and rebuild the different gemfiles (for example, to update a rails version or its dependencies), use the following:

rake gemfiles:rebuild

To support the multiple-gemfile testing, when adding a new dependency the following rules apply:

1. If it's a runtime dependency of the gem, add it to the gemspec
2. If it's a primary development dependency, add it to the gemspec
3. If it's a dependency of a generated rails app in a test, add it to the Gemfile (for local test runs) and each appraisal section (if necessary).

For example, rspec is a primary development dependency, so it lives in the gemspec. By contrast, coffee-rails is a dependency of apps generated with rails 3.1 and 3.2, so lives in the main Gemfile and the rails 3.1 and 3.2 appraisal sections.