Skip a behave step in the step implementation

Question

Is there a way to tell behave in a step implementation to skip the current step?

Something like:

@given("bla bla bla")
def step():
    skip_current_step()

The use case is that I want to check if some additional software is installed. If not, I want the complete scenario to be skipped.

Answer 1

Let me improve @Barry's answer:

Basically, what he proposed (i.e. scenario.mark_skipped()) is equal to:

scenario.skip(require_not_executed=True)

To be exact, mark_skipped()'s source looks like this:

def mark_skipped(self):
    """Marks this scenario (and all its steps) as skipped.
    Note that this method can be called before the scenario is executed.
    """
    self.skip(require_not_executed=True)
    assert self.status == "skipped", "OOPS: scenario.status=%s" % self.status

skip() is defined like so:

def skip(self, reason=None, require_not_executed=False)

A few things:

• require_not_executed=True means that scenario cannot be skipped if any step has already passed, i.e. mark_skipped() in second or later step will throw an Exception and then skip all the steps afterwards, instead of just skipping the further steps
• skip() allows to provide a reason for skipping, which is then logged as WARN.

Furthermore, scenario object is available in context as context.scenario (alongside context.feature).

Ultimately, simple example:

@given("test photos in upload directory")
def step_impl(context):
    if not connection_available():
        context.scenario.skip(reason='internet connection is unavailable')

Result:

Skipped: skipped
WARNING:behave:SKIP Scenario Retrieving uploaded photo details: internet connection is unavailable

Answer 2

I don't know if you can skip from inside of a step, but you can skip a whole scenario at feature level:

def before_feature(context, feature):
    is_software_installed = some_foo_magic()

    if not is_software_installed:
        for scenario in feature.scenarios:
            if depends_on_software(scenario):
                scenario.mark_skipped()

Feature, Scenario, and ScenarioOutline all have a mark_skipped() method.