Running Cucumber-JVM with step definitions in Java using Gradle javaexec task

Credits

This work is based on dkowis/cucumber-jvm-groovy-example

Motivation

There exists a number of issues which prevent seamless integration of Cucumber-JVM and Gradle.

Solution

One possible solution is to use Cucumber's Main class to run your tests. You can do this by using javaexec task in Gradle.

Running

In order to run your Cucumber tests execute:

gradle cucumber

Caveats

Groovy example by David Kowis runs perfectly, but it uses Groovy step definitions.

If you're writing your step definitions in Java then Gradle script needs to be changed slightly.

Here are some caveats:

• cucumber task has to depend on compileTestJava task in order to compile test sources

task cucumber() {
    dependsOn assemble, compileTestJava
    ...
}

• javaexec classpath should include main and test output directories. Otherwise Cucumber-JVM will not find your production classes/resources and step definitions respectively.

classpath = configurations.cucumberRuntime + sourceSets.main.output + sourceSets.test.output

• Cucumber's --glue should be set to your package name (e.g. gradle.cucumber) and NOT to src/test/java

args = ['-f', 'pretty', '--glue', 'gradle.cucumber', 'src/test/resources']