Vagrant Cucumber
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
The plugin requires cucumber and vagrant-multiprovider-snap gems, but will install these 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
As well as the vagrant-cucumber plugin, this will also install the vagrant-multiprovider-snap plugin if you don't already have it.
vagrant-cucumber will also install a version of cucumber >= 1.3.2 under the Ruby environment provided by Vagrant.
Usage
This plugin adds a subcommand, vagrant cucumber
- this simply wraps
the usual cucumber
commandline 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.