Cucumber jvm seems to use System.exit

Question

I am calling Cucumber JVM as part of a maven life cycle using the exec plugin. However, Cucumber seems to use System.exit() when it terminates so it prematurely stops my maven run. This forces me to fork it to a separate process but that presents issues when I am trying to debug a test.

Is there a way to politely ask Cucumber JVM to not use System.exit() when it terminates?

Answer 1

(I'm assuming there is a good reason not to use the junit runner & that you're calling cucumber.api.cli.Main, if either assumption is false pls clarify the question)

The simplest/most expedient solution, given that cucumber.api.cli.Main is approx 4 lines of code, is to write your own main method that is a clone of the cucumber one without the System.exit call.

Separately you could raise the issue on their github site and/or send them a pull request with the required tweak to their Main class (e.g. don't do the system.exit if some system property has been set).

Answer 2

when calling commandline, use

mvn exec:exec

instead of

mvn exec:java

to avoid that maven is run in the same VM as cucumber. exex:exec exec:java