@badeball/cypress-cucumber-preprocessor

Tags applied to parent elements are automatically inherited by their children:

• Tags on a Feature are inherited by all Scenario, Scenario Outline, and Examples within that feature.
• Tags on a Scenario Outline are inherited by its Examples blocks.

The Pretty output functionality is not entirely contained within the reporter itself. Because reporters are limited to Mocha's event domain (which is unaware of Cucumber steps), the actual step-printing logic is driven by the code running within setupNodeEvents() { .. }.

When the @badeball/cypress-cucumber-preprocessor/pretty-reporter is detected, the setupNodeEvents logic takes over the responsibility for generating the pretty output. However, when using cypress-multi-reporters, this detection fails, necessitating the manual pretty.enabled: true configuration mentioned previously.

Step definitions can use either regular expressions or Cucumber Expressions to match Gherkin steps. When using regular expressions, each capture group is passed as an argument to the step definition function. When using Cucumber Expressions, you can use built-in parameter types like {int}.

Example using a Cucumber Expression:

Given("I have {int} cukes in my belly", (cukes: number) => {});

The package cypress-cucumber-preprocessor is the old, outdated version. The current, maintained version is @badeball/cypress-cucumber-preprocessor.

Do not mix these two packages in the same project. Always use @badeball/cypress-cucumber-preprocessor for new projects.

Due to a limitation in Cypress, only a single event handler can exist for each event type. If multiple plugins attempt to register handlers for the same event, one will override the other, leading to unexpected behavior (e.g., screenshots not being added to JSON reports).

The @badeball/cypress-cucumber-preprocessor plugin subscribes to the following events:

• before:run
• after:run
• before:spec
• after:spec
• after:screenshot

If you use other plugins that also define these handlers (such as allure-cypress, cypress-code-coverage, or cypress-mochawesome-reporter), you may encounter conflicts.

The preprocessor supports two special tags for quick test control:

• @only: If no tags environment variable is provided, any scenario tagged with @only will be the only one to run (similar to Mocha's .only()).
• @skip: Scenarios tagged with @skip will always be skipped, even if they match other active tag filters.

Unlike standard Cucumber where step definitions are globally available, this preprocessor uses a concept called Pairing.

Pairing dictates which step definitions and hooks are available to a specific feature file. This is controlled entirely by the stepDefinitions configuration. If a step definition file is not matched by the patterns in your stepDefinitions array for a given feature file, it will not be available, and its hooks will not execute for that feature.

This allows you to create isolated test environments where step definitions and hooks only apply to specific subsets of your feature files.

While the preprocessor does not implement a native setWorldConstructor, you can replicate its behavior by using a beforeEach hook in your Cypress support file.

By defining a state object and using Object.assign(this, world) inside a beforeEach function, you can attach custom methods and variables to the Cucumber world context, making them available to all step definitions via this.

// cypress/support/e2e.ts
beforeEach(function () {
  const world = {
    variable: 0,

    setTo(number) {
      this.variable = number;
    },

    incrementBy(number) {
      this.variable += number;
    }
  };

  Object.assign(this, world);
});