One of my colleagues once described the Ruby community as "Test Infected" and if any library epitomizes this it's Capybara, which has gained popularity exponentially since it was first released. The Ruby community certainly owes its creator Jonas Nicklas a great deal of thanks for bringing peace and harmony to many test automation code bases around the globe.
The proof of Capybara's success is the way in which its use has spread far beyond just testing Rails applications and now supports testing of many web applications written in a wide variety of languages and frameworks. Capybara's functionality has also been replicated in languages other than Ruby again highlighting just how powerful the concept is.
So what is Capybara?
Capybara provides a domain-specific language for test automation; this DSL extends the human-readable BDD style of frameworks such as Cucumber and RSpec into the automation code itself. For example, opening a browser and navigating to a URL is as simple as visit http://google.com. This is a vast improvement over typical test APIs.
Additionally Capybara allows us to write tests once and run them in any compatible driver. The driver ecosystem is vibrant and switching libraries is as simple as adding an additional gem and making a one-line change to your code.
Finally, you can do away with writing bespoke methods that wait for content to become visible or adding sleep statements to your tests; Capybara handles asynchronous JavaScript without the user even noticing.
Capybara is quite literally your one-stop shop for test automation.
Chapter 1, Your First Scenario with Capybara, covers installation and configuration of your first scenario using Capybara.
Chapter 2, Mastering the API, provides a deep dive into Capybara's API for interacting with web pages.
Chapter 3, Testing Rails and Sinatra Applications, helps us explore how Capybara is particularly suited to testing applications implemented using Rails or Sinatra.
Chapter 4, Dealing with Ajax, JavaScript, and Flash, covers how to handle asynchronous JavaScript and how to use Capybara to test black box components such as Flash or HTML5 Canvas, Audio, and Video.
Chapter 5, Ninja Topics, helps us in using Capybara outside Cucumber in bespoke frameworks, within popular test frameworks such as RSpec and explores some alternatives to Capybara's built-in drivers.
This book and the examples were developed using Ruby-1.9.3p237, RubyGems 1.8.23, and most importantly Capybara 2.1.0, which introduced some significant changes. All other dependencies will be downloaded by either RubyGems or Bundler when you install Capybara. We will also use Cucumber and RSpec, the latest versions of which should all be compatible with Capybara 2.1.0 and above.
This book is for developers and testers who, with some exposure to Ruby, want to know how to test their applications using Capybara and its compatible drivers such as Selenium WebDriver and Rack::Test. The examples are deliberately kept simple and example HTML markup is always included so that readers can copy the examples to practice and experiment on their own machine.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The only source of confusion here might be the use of the string literal search_query in the fill_in method."
A block of code is set as follows:
<div id="main">
<div class="section">
<a id="myanchor" title="myanchortitle" href="#">Click thisAnchor</a>
</div>
</div>Any command-line input or output is written as follows:
$ ruby -v ruby 1.9.3p327 (2012-11-10 revision 37606) [x86_64-darwin11.4.2]
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "After this we need to enter our search terms and click on the Search button."
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