Chapter 11
The Cucumber Command-Line Interface

Cucumber can be used to test almost any computer system. In this final part of the book, we’re going to give you a set of recipes that you can pick and choose from depending on your circumstances. Most of those recipes are technical: you’ll find guidance on testing web services, command-line programs, and Ajax-heavy websites, but there’s also a chapter about testing legacy systems that doesn’t contain much code at all. We’ll start by giving you an in-depth tour of Cucumber’s user interface: the command line.

We have done our best to make Cucumber work out of the box without complex configuration. It doesn’t require you to provide a configuration file or pass a lot of complex command-line options to work. However, there are times when we want to tweak how Cucumber behaves.

Sometimes the default output can be too verbose, or perhaps we need it in a format that is easier to share with others. We might want to run just a subset of scenarios or perhaps organize the location of our Gherkin features and step definitions a little differently.

In this chapter, we are going to take a closer look at what command-line options Cucumber has to offer and how they can help you achieve some of these things.