Cucumber-Ruby 4.0.0 has been released

This is the first stable Cucumber release of the 4.x series. It's the first stable release for 2 years. Upgrading from 3.x should not require any changes, but there are some deprecations (see below). We also have some exciting new features!

 

Added new Gherkin syntax: Rules and Examples

 

One of the most visible change in the new release is the support of the Gherkin 6+ syntax. This is still backward compatible with your existing features of course, but here are the changes introduced:

• the Rule keyword acts as a grouping of scenarios inside a feature
• the Scenario Outline keyword is not needed anymore when using Examples with a Scenario
• the Scenario keyword now has synonym: Example

If you are familiar with example mapping, you will see how easy it is to translate your cards from an example mapping session into a feature file.

 

support of the cucumber-messages protocol

 

cucumber-messages is the new format that is used by Cucumber to represent the various information emitted during an execution.

This library satisfies multiple interests:

• same output for all cucumber and related implementation (cucumber-ruby, cucumber-jvm, cucumber-jss, SpecFlow ...)
• it relies on protobuf, so it is fairly easy to generate a consumer in any language supported by protobuf.
• we have published libraries to consume this format for ruby, Java, JavaScript and C#
• it is easier to generate tools consuming this output

To generate the new messages, you can use the message reporter.

Example:

bundle exec cucumber --format message

 

sending results to a server

 

You now have the option to send the results of the execution directly to a web server. You can achieve this by specifying an http or http URL to the --out parameter.

Example:

bundle exec cucumber --format messages --out "http://example.com/report-service" 

 

HTML reporter

 

We've added a brand new HTML reporter in this release. Everything is embedded in a single file (no CSS or JS file), so you can easily share the generated page.

 

Example:

bundle exec cucumber --format html --out report.html

 

Deprecated JSON formatter

 

With the introduction of the message formatter, we have decided to deprecate the JSON formatter. It will be removed in the 5.0.0 release. After the removal, you will still have the possibility to export to JSON using the json-formatter which takes cucumber-messages as input.

 

puts

 

When using puts in your step definitions, the data you output is caught by cucumber and then processed by the formatter (for example, when using the json formatter, the data provided to puts will appear in the output field of the step). This solution is now deprecated in favor of the log method. In cucumber-ruby 5, calls to puts will not be caught by the formatter and the default Ruby behavior will be triggered.

 

embed

 

The embed method to add attachments is also deprecated in favor of the attach method. This is part of task to make the different implementations of cucumber more uniform.