How can I run my grails-5 app's cucumber tests as part of ./gradlew check?

Question

I am writing a Grails-5 and I am using cucumber for BDD. I've followed the tutorial at: https://www.baeldung.com/java-cucumber-gradle

I can run my unit tests using:

$ ./gradlew check

And I can run my cucumber BDD tests by starting the server in one shell:

$ ./gradlew server:bootRun

And invoking the tests in another:

$ ./gradlew cucumberCli

Is it possible to configure build.gradle in such a way as to have ./gradlew check run the unit tests, then start the server, then run the cucumber tests, and finally bring the server back down?

If at all possible, it would be even better if the cucumber infrastructure could start and stop the server between each test. That way each test would start in a known state.

Answer 1

I managed to get this working by adding @Before and @After steps to my StepDefinitions.groovy file:

    def serverProcess

    private String getBaseUrl() {
        return "http://localhost/"
    }

    @Before
    public void startServer() {
        try {
            serverProcess=Runtime.getRuntime().exec("../gradlew bootRun")
        } catch (IOException e) {
            e.printStackTrace()
        }

        def done = false
        while(!done) {
            try {
                done = new URL(getBaseUrl()).openConnection().getResponseCode() == 200
            } catch(Exception e) {
                Thread.sleep(500)
            }
        }
    }

    @After
    public void stopServer() {
        serverProcess.destroy()
    }