How I set up Cucumber + Gherkin to test a Spring Boot web app — step-by-step
Spring Boot + Cucumber BDD Setup 🚀
A production-grade Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) setup using Cucumber, Gherkin, and RestAssured to test a Spring Boot web app.
This project intentionally separates test automation from the main application code to keep CI/CD pipelines clean, independent, and scalable.
🛠 Tech Stack
Java 17 & Maven
Cucumber (v7.x) for Gherkin execution and Spring integration
RestAssured for API testing
Target App: springboot-cucumber-testapp (A lightweight Spring Boot + H2 app)
🏗 Architecture Highlights
Instead of dumping everything into step definitions, this project uses a clean, layered architecture:
clients/: Dedicated REST clients (e.g., UserClient) to handle HTTP requests.
stepdefs/: Stateless, readable Cucumber step definitions that only handle intent and assertions.
utils/: A ContextStorage component to bridge state (like generated IDs) across steps.
runners/: Tag-based JUnit test runners (@smoke, @functional) for targeted execution.
features/: Plain English, business-readable test scenarios.
👉 Full technical walkthrough & Code: / how-i-set-up-cucumber-gherkin-to-test-a-sp...
Happy Coding! 🚀