Cucumber-ruby 4.0rc4 is out

We're super excited to announce the latest (and, we hope, last) release candidate for Cucumber-ruby 4. This new release introduces the following changes:

• a new formatter for Cucumber::Messages
• log and attach methods for step definitions
• cucumber-compatibility-kit compliance
• some deprecations

message formatter

The main change for this new release is the support of the new message formatter, which produces all the information about the test execution in a NDJSON report.

This new formatter can be easily used with the command:

cucumber --format message

At the moment, we provide two tools supporting this new format:

• the stand-alone json-formatter
• the new html-formatter

This new message format is one of the most important building-blocks on which we are building the new versions of cucumber.

log and attach in step definitions

In order to have a more consistent API across different implementations of Cucumber, we have introduced two new methods usable inside step definitions:

• log(message) logs a String which will be handled by the formatters
• attach(data, media_type) attaches a file alongside the report

CCK compliance

This release is also the first one that complies with the cucumber-compatibility-kit, which is a set of tests that ensures that all versions of Cucumber (Ruby, Java, Javascript ...) support the same set of features and produce the same messages.

Deprecations

The built-in JSON formatter (when running cucumber --format=json) is now deprecated in favor of the the message formatter used with the stand-alone json-formatter.

Attaching files to the report should be done with attach, and embed is now deprecated. The same goes with the puts methods, which should now be favored by log. This means that, when version 5.0 is out, when you use puts inside a step definition, this will simply output to the console, without being passed to the formatters. In the meantime, a deprecation warning will be output -- you can use Kernel.puts to avoid that warning.