Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@vejeta

vejeta/cucumber_scala_emacs.md

Last active February 28, 2016 04:13
Show Gist options
  • Star 1 You must be signed in to star a gist
  • Fork 0 You must be signed in to fork a gist
  • Save vejeta/e2833c9168e80d74c0f7 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save vejeta/e2833c9168e80d74c0f7 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Download ZIP
Tests with Cucumber, and Support with Scala, SBT and Emacs
Raw
cucumber_scala_emacs.md

Introduction

When I first heard about cucumber, it was in a emacs related post (http://www.47deg.com/blog/scala-development-with-emacs)

There, ldeck asked about using cucumber-scala with emacs... and then after some time I started the research about cucumber.

Let's learn a bit about Cucumber

Definition

The first thing is to define what cucumber is. According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cucumber_%28software%29) Cucumber is used for testing other software through acceptance tests written in a behaviour-driven development style. Yes, tests can now be written in plain text, in what are called feature files.

Implementations

  • Cucumber original implementation (https://cucumber.io/) is written in Ruby. The project page states that it works with Ruby, Java, .NET, Flex.

  • However, that pages forget to mention that there is an implementation than run in emacs: Ecukes. Ecukes is Cucumber for Emacs and it can be used to test our Emacs packages. Please, notice, Ecukes is very clear about this. Ecukes is not a major mode to help editing cucumber files.

  • There is also another implementation in Java that supports "the most popular programming languages for the JVM", including Scala: cucumber-jvm

Editing Cucumber files

In Emacs we have modes, modes provide things like colouring, syntax completion and additional functionality when editing certain kind of files.

We have cucumber.el (https://github.com/michaelklishin/cucumber.el) to edit plain text user stories for cucumber. With it, we have nice syntax highlighting and indenting.

In IntelliJ, there is this plugin http://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/7460?pr=idea, it allows navigation through the steps of the test, and also finding usages of the step definitions. See also: https://www.jetbrains.com/idea/help/cucumber.html

For Eclipse, there is: https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-eclipse

Using cucumber-scala

To test this I checked out: https://github.com/skipoleschris/xsbt-cucumber-plugin

This project provides the ability to run [cucumber-jvm with Scala)(https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm) within the SBT environment

Look for the Project Setup Section and update your project/plugins/build.sbt

It contains some test projects. I copied "testProject" to a new directory and changed project/build.properties

From

sbt.version=0.13.0

to

sbt.version=0.13.9

so I can use Ensime.

When you are in a Scala file, type C-c C-v s to launch the sbt console inside emacs.

And then inside sbt:

cucumber

See the attached screenshot. enter image description here

So, as far as I can see, there would be a nice project to make a mode like cucumber.el that uses [cucumber-jvm with Scala)(https://github.com/cucumber/cucumber-jvm) that is based on the JVM, instead of the ruby one.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment