Code found in features/support/env.rb is run when Cucumber begins and exits so this seemed the right place to start Solr:

Sunspot::Rails::Server.new.start
 
at_exit do
  Sunspot::Rails::Server.new.stop
end

Also, make sure you’ve added a cucumber environment to the config/sunspot.yml file; we copied the test-environment for that:

test: &TEST
  solr:
    hostname: localhost
    port: 8981
    log_level: WARNING
 
cucumber:
  <<: *TEST

Running cucumber will let all scenarios fail unfortunately and we got a ‘Connection refused – connect(2) (RSolr::RequestError)‘ in our console.

The reason for this is simple (after I stepped into the sunspot_rails gem to be honest): the Sunspot::Rails::Server.new.start method will eventually launch a Java Servlet Container (Jetty) with the Solr WAR and uses the port defined in your sunspot.yml.
Now, starting up a server could take some time, so if cucumber’s features are run before the Solr server is up and running, the ‘Connection refused’ sounds trivial then.
First I added a sleep after starting up the server:

Sunspot::Rails::Server.new.start
sleep(5)

and this will work for most cases, but I thought it would be better to let cucumber wait just long enough until the server is up and running. When the server is up, you can open up your browser and enter http://localhost:8981/solr to administering Solr. This we can use to find out if we’ve waited long enough and start our features. I’ve put this into a seperate class named CukeSunspot and created this file in the features/support directory:

require "net/http"
 
class CukeSunspot
 
  def initialize
    @server = Sunspot::Rails::Server.new
  end
 
  def start
    @started = Time.now
    @server.start
    up
  end
 
  private
  def port
    @server.port
  end
 
  def uri
    "http://0.0.0.0:#{port}/solr/"
  end
 
  def up
    while starting
      puts "Sunspot server is starting..."
    end
    puts "Sunspot server took #{'%.2f' % (Time.now - @started)} sec. to get up and running. Let's cuke!"
  end
 
  def starting
    begin
      sleep(1)
      request = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse(uri))
      false
    rescue Errno::ECONNREFUSED
      true
    end
  end
 
end

Now we can the alternative start method and remove the explicit sleep statement in our global before hook. features/support/env.rb:

CukeSunspot.new.start
 
at_exit do
  Sunspot::Rails::Server.new.stop
end

And voila, if you run cucumber, you scenario’s should run successfully. On my machine:

Sunspot server is starting...
Sunspot server is starting...
Sunspot server took 3.74 sec. to get up and running. Let's cuke!