Setting up cucumber inside a Rails project is no more difficult than
running script/generate cucumber. But what does one do when working
without Rails at all? How do you generate the features tree and all of
its default files?
I use mkdir and touch.
I use mkdir and touch.
Me too
Aslak Hellesøy wrote:
I use mkdir and touch.
Me too
Yeah, “mkdir -p features/support && mkdir -p features/step_defnintions
&& touch features/support/env.rb” is really all you need.
However, for new projects I really like to use jeweler to bootstrap all
the setup for Cucumber, RSpec, Rakefiles, etc… With jeweler you just
say “jeweler cool_gem --cucumber --rspec” and all of this gets generated
for you:
create .gitignore
create Rakefile
create LICENSE
create README.rdoc
create .document
create lib
create lib/cool_gem.rb
create spec
create spec/spec_helper.rb
create spec/cool_gem_spec.rb
create features
create features/cool_gem.feature
create features/support
create features/support/env.rb
create features/step_definitions
create features/step_definitions/cool_gem_steps.rb
Here is jewelers site: http://technicalpickles.github.com/jeweler/
-Ben
You know what’d be awesome?
If Cucumber scenarios were referential.
I mean, wouldn’t it be awesome if you could refer to them… so you
could build on them…
So in a login.feature I’d define:
Scenario: logging in
Given that a default user exists
And I am on the login page
When I fill in “username” with “username”
And I fill in “password” with “password”
Then I should be logged in
And then in a different feature somewhere else, I could say:
another.feature
Scenario: make toast
Given Scenario “logging in”
Given I am on the exciting logged in page
Then I … blah blah blah
and so on…
Julian.
Julian L. wrote:
Given that a default user exists
Given Scenario “logging in”
Given I am on the exciting logged in page
Then I … blah blah blahand so on…
Julian.
Believe it or not, this exact feature did exist in Cucumber at one time
but was deprecated and is now removed. You can find a good explanation
of the reasoning behind that decision and what are the better
alternatives on Joseph’s blog:
-Ben
Hi Julian,
You can do just that, the scenarios stack like that quite well, and it
is
reasonable to call a step from another, but you should have something
like
Scenario: Logging In
Given there is a user
When I visit the login page
And I fill in username with …
And I fill in passowrd with …
Then I should be logged in as …
Scenario: Visiting Account Page
Given I am logged in
When I visit the account page
Then I should see my account settings
… “Given I am logged in” you define to call in turn each of the step
matchers you wrote to satisfy the first scenario.
… does that fit your expectations / workflow?
2009/5/2 Julian L. [email protected]
Julian L. wrote:
Hence… my interest in this feature
Then I should be on the superduper page
Given…
When…
Then…Then the option to turn this feature off or on on the command line.
We would definitely want it as a feature you could turn on or off. By
default I think it should be off. I think it adds a lot of noise to the
feature output. In most cases I don’t care what the exact steps of
logging in are. How I log in can change and it doesn’t really effect
this scenario at all. What is important is that you are logged in- not
how you got there. So this is probably not a feature I would personally
use. (Especially, given that I don’t use steps within steps a whole
lot.) That said it seems like a reasonable request… Any other
opinions on the suggested feature? Should we move the discussion to
lighthouse?
-Ben
Aslak Hellesøy wrote:
I use mkdir and touch.
Me too
Fine for those that know cucumber inside out. A bit sparse for the rest
of creation.
What I ended up doing was copying an example directory tree from the
cucumber gem and deleting most of it. It would be useful for non-Rails
users of cucumber if cucumber itself had an option to copy a template
directory tree from the gem into a project root. In other words:
$ cd project_root
$ tree
.
|-- bin
|-- doc
-- lib $ $ cucumber --initialize $ tree . |-- Rakefile |-- bin |-- doc |-- features | |-- sample.feature | |-- step_definitions | |– sample_steps.rb
| -- support | |-- env.rb |– tag_count_formatter.rb
`-- lib
Fair enough.
The steps from step definitions one is the best approach for what I
want, and it’s actually what am doing, but I do notice that there’s a
lot of the time when I’m actually re-typing the same text (ie once in
the explicit explanation of what it means to log in, and then once
more in the step definitions to refer to that login procedure) when I
do this approach. Re-typing the same stuff is pretty retarded, and
never a good idea.
Hence… my interest in this feature 
How about this… Whenever I refer to other steps from within my
steps, they should be printed out on the output line… tabbed in a
bit, like so:
Given I am logged in:
Given a default user exists
And I am on the login page
And I fill in “username” with “username”
And I fill in “password” with “password”
Then I should be on the superduper page
Given…
When…
Then…
Then the option to turn this feature off or on on the command line.
That’d be bloody brilliant. Okay so maybe I should go fork it and do
it
Julian.
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 1:34 PM, James B. [email protected]
wrote:
Aslak Hellesøy wrote:
I use mkdir and touch.
Me too
Fine for those that know cucumber inside out. A bit sparse for the rest
of creation.
You only need this to start:
±features/
±foo.feature
Then you can add some more when it gets yellow:
±features/
±step_definitions/
±bar_steps.rb
And some more when you need hooks etc:
±features/
±step_definitions/
±bar_steps.rb
±support/
±env.rb
You can also try one of these:
http://newgem.rubyforge.org/
newgem -T rspec -i cucumber mygem
GitHub - technicalpickles/jeweler: Opinionated tool for creating and managing Rubygem projects
jeweler --cucumber --rspec mygem
Aslak
Aslak Hellesøy wrote:
You only need this to start:
±features/
±foo.feature
I realize this. I am not complaining. I just think that for a modest
amount of effort cucumber could be made self starting for the large
number of people who do not have any prior experience with either Rails
or Cucumber and who probably do not know about jeweller and newgem. I
had no idea such things existed or were possible until I received
replies to this thread.
I still recall the vast amounts of time it took me to get going with
cucumber and BDD. And that was with the benefit of the Rails generators
that at least set me up with a skeleton to work from. I think it would
be useful to offer non-Rails users a similar facility.
On 2 May 2009, at 23:33, Ben M. wrote:
We would definitely want it as a feature you could turn on or off.
By default I think it should be off. I think it adds a lot of noise
to the feature output. In most cases I don’t care what the exact
steps of logging in are. How I log in can change and it doesn’t
really effect this scenario at all. What is important is that you
are logged in- not how you got there. So this is probably not a
feature I would personally use. (Especially, given that I don’t use
steps within steps a whole lot.) That said it seems like a
reasonable request… Any other opinions on the suggested feature?
Should we move the discussion to lighthouse?
I think this could be a useful debugging feature, although less
compelling since Cucumber started reporting failures in steps called
from steps the same way as steps called in a feature file. But
sometimes it’s useful to see in finer detail what Cucumber is doing.
One thing I wrestle with frequently is making scenarios fail fast and
transparently. Assumptions about what exactly is going on creep in,
and often, the step that reports failure is not the one that
fundamentally caused it. Anything to make that assumption-breaking
easier would be valuable IMHO.
Ashley
–
http://www.patchspace.co.uk/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleymoran
Aslak Hellesøy wrote:
Then that’s a case for better documentation - not more Cucumber
features.
Feel free to create a separate Wiki page for “plain ruby” projects that
points the user to newgem and jeweler.
Actually, that was what I was doing when I first raised the question.
On Sun, May 3, 2009 at 7:08 PM, James B. [email protected]
wrote:
Aslak Hellesøy wrote:
You only need this to start:
±features/
±foo.featureI realize this. I am not complaining. I just think that for a modest
I don’t think anyone think you were complaining. Your question is
perfectly
valid and understandable.
amount of effort cucumber could be made self starting for the large
number of people who do not have any prior experience with either Rails
or Cucumber and who probably do not know about jeweller and newgem. I
had no idea such things existed or were possible until I received
replies to this thread.
Then that’s a case for better documentation - not more Cucumber
features.
Feel free to create a separate Wiki page for “plain ruby” projects that
points the user to newgem and jeweler.
I won’t replicate features that are solved in other tools. If I do that,
Cucumber will become obese and die 
Aslak