capybara¶ ↑

• github.com/jnicklas/capybara

Description:¶ ↑

Capybara aims to simplify the process of integration testing Rack applications, such as Rails, Sinatra or Merb. It is inspired by and aims to replace Webrat as a DSL for interacting with a webapplication. It is agnostic about the driver running your tests and currently comes bundled with rack-test, Culerity and Selenium support built in.

Install:¶ ↑

Capybara is hosted on Gemcutter, install it with:

sudo gem install capybara

Development:¶ ↑

• Source hosted at GitHub.

• Please direct questions, discussions at the mailing list.

• Report issues on GitHub Issues

• Pull requests are very welcome!

Using Capybara with Cucumber¶ ↑

Capybara is built to work nicely with Cucumber. The API is very similar to Webrat, so if you know Webrat you should feel right at home. Support for Capybara is built into cucumber-rails 0.2. In your Rails app, just run:

script/generate cucumber --capybara

And everything should be set up and ready to go.

If you want to use Capybara with Cucumber outside Rails (for example with Merb or Sinatra), you’ll need require capybara and set the Rack app manually:

require 'capybara/cucumber'
Capybara.app = MyRackApp

Now you can use it in your steps:

When /I sign in/ do
  within("//form[@id='session']") do
    fill_in 'Login', :with => '[email protected]'
    fill_in 'Password', :with => 'password'
  end
  click_link 'Sign in'
end

Default and current driver¶ ↑

You can set up a default driver for your features. For example if you’d prefer to run Selenium, you could do:

require 'capybara/rails'
require 'capybara/cucumber'
Capybara.default_driver = :selenium

You can change the driver temporarily:

Capybara.current_driver = :culerity
Capybara.use_default_driver

You can do this in Before and After blocks to temporarily switch to a different driver. Note that switching driver creates a new session, so you may not be able to switch in the middle of a Scenario.

Cucumber and Tags¶ ↑

Capybara sets up some tags for you to use in Cucumber. Often you’ll want to run only some scenarios with a driver that supports JavaScript, Capybara makes this easy: simply tag the scenario (or feature) with @javascript:

@javascript
Scenario: do something AJAXy
  When I click the AJAX link
  ...

You can change which driver Capybara uses for JavaScript:

Capybara.javascript_driver = :culerity

There are also explicit @selenium, @culerity and @rack_test tags set up for you.

The API¶ ↑

Navigation:

visit – The only way to get to anywhere.

Scoping:

within – Takes a block which executes in the given scope
within_fieldset – Execute the block in the fieldset given by id or legend
within_table – Execute the block in the table given by id or caption

Interaction:

click_link
click_button
fill_in
choose
check
uncheck
attach_file
select

Querying:

body
has_xpath? – Checks if given XPath exists, takes text and count options
has_css? – Checks if given CSS exists, takes text and count options
has_content? – Checks if the given content is on the page
find_field
find_link
find_button
field_labeled

Scripting:

evaluate_script – Returns the value of the executed javascript (only works on javascript supported drivers)

Debugging:

save_and_open_page

Using the DSL outside cucumber¶ ↑

You can mix the DSL into any context, for example you could use it in RSpec examples. Just load the dsl and include it anywhere:

require 'capybara'
require 'capybara/dsl'

include Capybara
Capybara.default_driver = :culerity

within("//form[@id='session']") do
  fill_in 'Login', :with => '[email protected]'
  fill_in 'Password', :with => 'password'
end
click_link 'Sign in'

Using the sessions manually¶ ↑

For ultimate control, you can instantiate and use a session manually.

require 'capybara'

session = Capybara::Session.new(:culerity, my_rack_app)
session.within("//form[@id='session']") do
  session.fill_in 'Login', :with => '[email protected]'
  session.fill_in 'Password', :with => 'password'
end
session.click_link 'Sign in'

XPath and CSS¶ ↑

Capybara does not try to guess what kind of selector you are going to give it, if you want to use CSS with your ‘within’ declarations for example, you’ll need to do:

within(:css, 'ul li') { ... }

Alternatively you can set the default selector to CSS, which may help if you are moving from Webrat and used CSS a lot, or simply generally prefer CSS:

Capybara.default_selector = :css
within('ul li') { ... }

Gotchas:¶ ↑

• Install JRuby and the ‘celerity’ gem, version 0.7.4 (0.7.5 has a bug with password fields) under JRuby for Culerity support.

• Everything is *case sensitive*. Capybara heavily relies on XPath, which doesn’t support case insensitive searches.

• The have_tag and have_text matchers in RSpec-Rails are not supported. You should use page.should have_css('#header p'), page.should have_xpath('//ul/li') and page.should have_content('Monkey') instead.

• Domain names (including subdomains) don’t work under rack-test. Since it’s a pain to set up subdomains for the other drivers anyway, you should consider an alternate solution. You might use default_url_options in Rails for example.

• The set_hidden_field method from Webrat is not implemented, since it doesn’t work in any of the browser based drivers (Culerity, Selenium)

• Access to session, request and response from the test is not possible. Maybe we’ll do response headers at some point in the future, but the others really shouldn’t be touched in an integration test anyway.

• Access to Rails specific stuff (such as controller) is unavailable, since we’re not using Rails’ integration testing.

• <a href="#"> Will cause problems under rack-test, please do <a href="/same/url#"> instead. You can achieve this in Rails with link_to('foo', :anchor => '')

Contributors:¶ ↑

The following people have dedicated their time and effort to Capybara:

• Jonas Nicklas

• Dennis Rogenius

• Rob Holland

• Wincent Colaiuta

• Andrea Fazzi

• Aslak Hellesøy

• Andrew Brown

License:¶ ↑

(The MIT License)

Copyright © 2009 Jonas Nicklas

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.