Vagrant Cucumber

This is an open source project published by The Scale Factory.

We currently consider this project to be archived.

⚠️ We’re no longer using or working on this project. It remains available for posterity or reference, but we’re no longer accepting issues or pull requests.

Description

This plugin allows Vagrant to run Cucumber features, and provides some glue for working with Vagrant boxes within your Cucumber steps.

It was originally developed to help us test configuration management scripts, and with the following workflow in mind:

• Start one or more Vagrant boxes
• Configure these boxes with some default state
• Snapshot each box in this default state.
• In each Cucumber scenario
  • Run config management tools inside the box to make configuration changes
  • Test that these changes produce the desired result
  • Roll the VM state back, ready for the next scenario

Requirements

Since 0.1.x this plugin requires a minimum Vagrant version of 1.8.4.

The plugin requires the cucumber gem, but will install this itself if required.

Vagrant Cucumber currently works only with the current Vagrant providers:

• VirtualBox
• VMWare Fusion (using the commercial VMWare plugin for Vagrant)

Installation

Assuming you're running the packaged version of Vagrant, the easiest way to install this plugin is via the published gem:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-cucumber

vagrant-cucumber will install a version of cucumber >= 2.4.0 under the Ruby environment provided by Vagrant.

Usage

This plugin adds a subcommand, vagrant cucumber - this simply wraps the usual cucumber command line handler. Refer to the documentation for cucumber for details, or use vagrant cucumber -h for a full list of options.

Example

The git source of the plugin includes a folder called "example", which contains a Vagrantfile and features directory which demonstrates the plugin in action.

The Vagrantfile defines two basic VMs which will be used to run our tests. It will work with either the Virtualbox or the VMWare Fusion provider.

Use vagrant up in that folder in order to start the default VM. (In the current version of the plugin, VMs must be running before they can be used in tests). If you don't already have the standard precise64 vagrant box, it will be fetched from the Vagrant website. If you prefer to use the VMWare provider, add --provider=vmware_fusion to the commandline.

To run all the tests, run:

vagrant cucumber.

The tests are split between multiple feature files. You can run one feature file at a time by specifying it on the commandline:

vagrant cucumber features/basic.feature

basic.feature demonstrates running basic shell commands inside the VM both as the standard vagrant user, and as root. It also contains a test to show that snapshot rollback is working correctly.

multivm.feature shows how steps can reference different VMs. For details on how to write your own step definitions which can work on multiple VMs, see the next section.

The test in multivm.feature also demonstrates use of cucumber tags. The test scenario is preceded with the tag @vagrant-cucumber-debug. This causes debug output to be emitted.

We also provide a @norollback tag, which prevents the VMs from being rolled back at the end of the scenario. This is useful for debugging.

Implementation Detail

The best place to gain an understanding of the implementation of Cucumber steps is in example/features/step_definitions/process.rb. I've heavily commented this in order to be a good working example.

example/features/process.feature uses these step definitions.

Other step definitions and hooks are defined in lib/vagrant-cucumber/step_definitions.rb.

License

vagrant-cucumber is licensed under the MIT license.