Use Chrome with Cucumber & Capybara

We frequently swap out Firefox for Chrome in our selenium (@javascript) cucumber tests. It is actually very easy, but not widely known.

Update: I got some questions about why we’d use Chrome. Speed hasn’t been the issue (use capybara-webkit for that) but we have found some things that work better in Chrome vs Firefox (and vice-versa). Also, you get different rendering options and different standards support (for example, websockets). If you’re having test problems, switching probably isn’t your solution, but you can always try.

Step 1 – Tell Capybara about Chrome

Inside your features/support/env.rb add these lines:

Capybara.register_driver :chrome do |app|
  Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, :browser => :chrome)
end

Capybara.javascript_driver = :chrome

Step 2 – Install chromedriver

If you’re using homebrew on OS X (and why wouldn’t you?) simply install using:

brew install chromedriver

Otherwise, download it manually and make sure it is in your path (I typically put it in /usr/local/bin).

Step 3 – Run the features

Run your features and anything tagged with @javascript or @selenium is now running in Chrome instead of Firefox. Yay!