Exactly once only Before/After hook?

[v-mwalk]

This quite possibly applies only to Cucumber-JS; in which case humble apologies for posting here...

I am just about to embark on working out how to do a 'BeforeAll'/'AfterAll' activities that execute exactly ONCE per run. Irrelevant whether using parallel or not. BeforeAll and AfterAll execute every time for each parallel worker - however, I want them to execute only once.

I'm dabbling with a few ways of doing it but wanted to ask community if anyone else has done same already.

Reason I need this is that at start of testing I need to launch the AUT web server and at end tear it down again. When the site is launched I loop a ping (after axios.head...) to the site and only continue once I get a coherent response. Then tear down after testing. I could play around with lock files etc but that poses two main issues - race conditions and ensuring tear down ONLY when testing complete.

My current thought is to wrap the whole cucumber launch in a nodejs script. So;

• launch AUT
• wait for web server to be running and ready (sensible response from a axios.head request)
• launch cucumber-JS (quite easy as I'd just call the yarn script - this gig uses yarn)
• when cucumber exits, do the tear down

Could be quite simple actually; but wanted to check if anyone done same ish altready...?

[luke-hill]

Use your thread ID as a halting mechanism. then you have your desired logic

[davidjgoss]

I think your thought is about right. It's pretty similar to what browser testing tools tend to do for a local deployment e.g. https://www.npmjs.com/package/start-server-and-test