How to use -a in command line? - karate

Question

As documented for standalone-jar I'm trying to provide args to my feature and can't figure how to get it work. what do I miss ?
My command line :
java -jar c:\karate\karate-0.9.1.jar -a myKey1=myValue1 TestArgs.feature
karate-config.js
function fn() {
var env = karate.env;
karate.log('karate.env system property was:', env);
if (!env) {
env = 'test';
}
var config = { // base config JSON
arg:karate.properties['myKey1']
};
return config;
}
TestArgs.feature
Feature: test args
Scenario: print args
* print myKey1
* print arg
* print karate.properties['myKey1']
* print karate.get('myKey1')
I don't get anything printed :
java -jar c:\karate\karate-0.9.1.jar -a myKey1=myValue1 TestArgs.feature
10:32:57.904 [main] INFO com.intuit.karate.netty.Main - Karate version: 0.9.1
10:32:58.012 [main] INFO com.intuit.karate.Runner - Karate version: 0.9.1
10:32:58.470 [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-1] INFO com.intuit.karate - karate.env system property was: null
10:32:58.489 [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-1] INFO com.intuit.karate - [print]
10:32:58.491 [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-1] INFO com.intuit.karate - [print]
10:32:58.495 [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-1] INFO com.intuit.karate - [print]
10:32:58.501 [ForkJoinPool-1-worker-1] INFO com.intuit.karate - [print]

Answer 1

Actually we meant to delete the docs, apologies since the -a / --args option is not supported any more.
You can of course use the karate.properties['some.key'] approach to unpack values from the command-line. Also refer how you can even get environment variables: https://github.com/intuit/karate/issues/547
My suggestion is you can use karate-config-<env>.js to read a bunch of variables from a file if needed. For example, given this feature:
Feature:
Scenario:
* print myKey
And this file karate-config-dev.js:
function() { return { myKey: 'hello' } }
You can run this command, which will auto load the config js file:
java -jar karate.jar -e dev test.feature
We will update the docs. Thanks for catching this.