Note: if you want a mechanism to rerun just the failed scenarios when doing TDD, take a look at Rerun instead.
If you have a flaky scenario (e.g. failing 10% of the time for some reason), you can use Retry to have Cucumber attempt it multiple times until either it passes or the maximum number of attempts is reached. You enable this via the retry configuration option, like this:
- In a configuration file
{ retry: 1 } - On the CLI
$ cucumber-js --retry 1
The number you provide is the number of retries that will be allowed after an initial failure.
Note: Retry isn't recommended for routine use, but can be a good trade-off in some situations where you have a scenario that's too valuable to remove, but it's either not possible or not worth the effort to fix the flakiness.
Some notes on how Retry works:
- Only relevant failing scenarios are retried, not the whole test run.
- When a scenario is retried, it runs all hooks and steps again from the start with a fresh World - nothing is retained from the failed attempt.
- When a scenario passes on a retry, it's treated as a pass overall in the results, although the details of each attempt are emitted so formatters can access them.
Using the retry option alone would mean every scenario would be allowed multiple attempts - this almost certainly isn't what you want, assuming you have a small set of flaky scenarios. To target just the relevant scenarios, you can provide a tag expression via the retryTagFilter configuration option, like this:
- In a configuration file
{ retry: 1, retryTagFilter: '@flaky' } - On the CLI
$ cucumber-js --retry 1 --retry-tag-filter @flaky