[ANN] Cucumber Textmate Bundle

Testing RSpec
1

Hey all,
I am in the process of porting my RSpec Story Textmate bundle over to
Cucumber.
So far I have the syntax highlighting, file switching, and running of
the features and single scenarios done. So not all the functionally is
ported yet and it has some rough edges but I think it is ready to be
used/tested by more than just me. :slight_smile:

You can get it here:

Please read the README as it talks about avoiding RSpec Story bundle
collisions and how to run features.

Thanks,
Ben

2

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Ben M. [email protected] wrote:

Please read the README as it talks about avoiding RSpec Story bundle
collisions and how to run features.

Thanks a ton for making this, Ben. A couple of questions:

  • What do you think about making it run bin/cucumber instead of rake?
  • How can we make it play nice with the cucumber-supported languages?

Aslak

3

aslak hellesoy wrote:

You can get it here:

The advantage of using rake is that it gives a lot more flexibility to
the developer as far as what step files are being required, etc. In my
case for example I have two rake tasks. One that loads up an
environment for testing JS parts of my web app. The other task loads
the the standard rails story world and webrat. The problem I see with
going with the straight bin command is that the bundle would have no way
of knowing which files to require and which ones not to… We could
solve that with additional conventions and/or declaring more comments in
the features about it’s dependencies. I’m totally fine with changing it
if you have a good idea on how to solve the dependency problem that I
have explained.

  • How can we make it play nice with the cucumber-supported languages?

Hmm… I think we could easily modify the bundle’s syntax… yeah… this
is what I came up with for the plaintext features syntax:

The file is getting pretty ugly however. I think a better solution
would be for the bundle’s syntax files to be generated off of your
languages.yml file. I can investigate this latter as I think that would
be a much better solution going forward. Could we add Feature and the
narrative translations to the languages.yml file as well?

-Ben

4

aslak hellesoy wrote:

So far I have the syntax highlighting, file switching, and running of

the the standard rails story world and webrat. The problem I see with
What if cucumber could look for a cucumber.yml file that lookes
cucumber # Runs all rails feature

WDYT?

I like where you are going with this. That would be a lot faster than
rake doing a FileList too…

So, in the feature that is a watir one would they just add a comment
saying “# profile: waitir” or something like that?

We could actually have rake generate that yaml file for us based off of
glob patterns since I can imagine those lines could grow very long and
would be tedious to maintain by hand.

I’ll think about it for a couple of days before I implement it to see if
I can think of anything else, and maybe someone else would like to chime
in on the matter.

This is somewhat OT but in regards to your "cucumber # Runs all rails
feature " line… One problem I have had a hard time overcoming with
cucumber is how to run all of my stories together. Meaning, for my
watir env I may be creating a new browser object and doing things to the
database in my Before and After blocks that I don’t want/need to do when
I run my standard rails stories. Because of that and the fact that
cucumber in a way treats the entire process as the world it runs in it
doesn’t seem like you can run very different types of features in the
same process… Am I correct in saying that when environment s are very
different unique processes are required to run them separately? Like I
said, this is more of an aside and not relevant to the bundle.

be a much better solution going forward. Could we add Feature and the
narrative translations to the languages.yml file as well?

We could, but I’m a bit reluctant as Cucumber itself doesn’t care what
you write before the first scenario. What the hell, let’s add it
anyway - it’s good for the bundle and it’s what we want people to use
;-). I’ll add it.

Instead of stuffing it all in lanuages.yml maybe a new narratives.yml
could be created?

Ben

5

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 11:35 PM, Ben M. [email protected] wrote:

Cucumber.

environment for testing JS parts of my web app. The other task loads
Rake can be slow to fire up, so I like to have the raw commandline.
cucumber --profile watir # Runs all watir features

I prefer to associate the profile with a cucumber run. It should be
able to run a feature with different profiles. Each profile can list
what features to include.

We could actually have rake generate that yaml file for us based off of
glob patterns since I can imagine those lines could grow very long and
would be tedious to maintain by hand.

Why would they be long? It’s usually just a folder name or two.
Cucumber expands folders to files internally.

I’ll think about it for a couple of days before I implement it to see if
I can think of anything else, and maybe someone else would like to chime
in on the matter.

You mean implement it in Cucumber? This is where the interpretation of
cucumber.yml should sit.

This is somewhat OT but in regards to your "cucumber # Runs all rails
feature " line… One problem I have had a hard time overcoming with
cucumber is how to run all of my stories together. Meaning, for my

cucumber folder_name

(cucumber --help mentions this)

watir env I may be creating a new browser object and doing things to the
database in my Before and After blocks that I don’t want/need to do when
I run my standard rails stories. Because of that and the fact that

What I do is to run cucumber twice. Once with features using standard
webrat/rails stuff and once with features using watir (we use this for
some ajax stuff). Then store results in two different files.

cucumber in a way treats the entire process as the world it runs in it
doesn’t seem like you can run very different types of features in the
same process… Am I correct in saying that when environment s are very
different unique processes are required to run them separately? Like I

Yep. I don’t see much value in combining different environments into one
run.

Aslak

6

aslak hellesoy wrote:

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 8:42 PM, Ben M. [email protected] wrote:

of knowing which files to require and which ones not to… We could

WDYT?

Why would they be long? It’s usually just a folder name or two.
Cucumber expands folders to files internally.

Ok, nm, I thought you had to list each file individually.

I’ll think about it for a couple of days before I implement it to see if
I can think of anything else, and maybe someone else would like to chime
in on the matter.

You mean implement it in Cucumber? This is where the interpretation of
cucumber.yml should sit.

Yeah, I agree with that. I will wait on the bundle implementation until
the cucumber command has been modified.

I’ve added a ticket:
http://rspec.lighthouseapp.com/projects/16211-cucumber/tickets/12-add-profile-tag-to-cucumber-bin-with-yml-config

watir env I may be creating a new browser object and doing things to the
doesn’t seem like you can run very different types of features in the
same process… Am I correct in saying that when environment s are very
different unique processes are required to run them separately? Like I

Yep. I don’t see much value in combining different environments into one run.

The only value would be in combining both runs into a single report.
Not the most important thing but it would be a nice to have.

7

Ben M. wrote:

You can get it here:
GitHub - bmabey/cucumber-tmbundle: TextMate bundle for Cucumber - This fork is no longer maintained, please see the README.

This is probably blindingly obvious to anyone who’s ever installed a
Textmate bundle from github before (i.e. not me), but you have to rename
cucumber-tmbundle to cucumber.tmbundle before TextMate will recognize
it.
Dunno if that should go in the README or not.

Jay L.

8

On Wed, Sep 17, 2008 at 10:56 PM, Ben M. [email protected] wrote:

  • What do you think about making it run bin/cucumber instead of rake?
    if you have a good idea on how to solve the dependency problem that I
    have explained.

Rake can be slow to fire up, so I like to have the raw commandline.
What if cucumber could look for a cucumber.yml file that lookes
something like the following?

default: rails
rails: --require features/steps/common --require features/steps/rails
watir: --require features/steps/common --require features/steps/watir

And then be able to run features like this:

cucumber --profile watir # Runs all watir features
cucumber # Runs all rails feature

WDYT?

narrative translations to the languages.yml file as well?

We could, but I’m a bit reluctant as Cucumber itself doesn’t care what
you write before the first scenario. What the hell, let’s add it
anyway - it’s good for the bundle and it’s what we want people to use
;-). I’ll add it.

Aslak

9

Just installed this - superb!

Thanks Ben.

10

Jay L. wrote:

Jay L.

rspec-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users

Yeah, it should go in the readme. Sorry, about that. I’ll update it
now.

-Ben

11

Is it possible to rename the project maybe? I know you can have dots
in the name - e.g. GitHub - thoughtworks/cruisecontrol.rb: CruiseControl for Ruby. Keep it simple.
though I think I may have heard this was a restriction that was lifted
relatively recently.

12

On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 5:54 PM, Ben M. [email protected] wrote:

I would guess the source of the problem is that Rails doesn’t like
dots in resource names. Because in Rails a dot is an alias mechanism
for the HTTP Accepts header. (/blah and /blah.xml for instance)

Aslak

13

Matt W. wrote:

Is it possible to rename the project maybe? I know you can have dots
in the name - e.g. GitHub - thoughtworks/cruisecontrol.rb: CruiseControl for Ruby. Keep it simple.
though I think I may have heard this was a restriction that was lifted
relatively recently.

I’ll look into it. I named it that because all of the other textmate
bundles on github that I’ved used have followed the same convention.
That makes sense if, like you said, they just relaxed the naming rules.

Thanks,
Ben

14

Ben M. wrote:

Thanks,
Ben

rspec-users mailing list
[email protected]
http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/rspec-users
I can rename it but by doing so I may mess up all of the forks and
everyone would need to update their clone url in .git/config. What do
you think, is it worth changing the name?

-Ben

15

How about - can you somehow fork it to the new name, thereby keeping
the old things up and running but blazing a new and shiny train from
henceforth?

Otherwise, it’s gotta be a no, hasn’t it?