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Use Chrome with Cucumber & Capybara

by Daniel Morrison

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!

Comments

glenn
::

Thanks mate, this works fiine, but do you know how to override the user agent of the chrome browser? i’ve seen alot of tutorials but only with Firefox, but i much rather do it with chrome browser.

Cyril
::

@glenn: see https://makandracards.com/makandra/8381-run-chrome-in-a-specific-resolution-or-user-agent-with-selenium.

Maninder
::

no able to find inner html of an element eg

Hello World

not able o get value "Hello World" Using cucumber, capybara and crome driver All Latest versions
Paul Kruger
::

Does not work on mavricks

gabe
::

My env.rb looks like this:

Capybara.default_selector = :css Capybara.register_driver :selenium do |app| Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new(app, :browser => :chrome, :switches => %w[–test-type]) #comment it out!!! end ActionController::Base.allow_rescue = false begin   DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction rescue NameError   raise “You need to add database_cleaner to your Gemfile (in the :test group) if you wish to use it.” end Cucumber::Rails::Database.javascript_strategy = :truncation

that’s the parts that are not commented out anyway. It works great. I would like to test in firefox as well, and ideally eventually with other browsers. How do I switch back to firefox? 

thanks.