How do poltergeist/PhantomJS and capybara-webkit differ

capybaracapybara-webkitphantomjspoltergeist

What are the differences between PhantomJS and capybara-webkit?
What are the advantages of capybara-webkit over PhantomJS?
Which of the two is the most efficient tool?
Others …

Best Answer

poltergeist is the capybara driver for PhantomJS, a headless browser which is built on WebKit. capybara-webkit is a capybara driver which uses WebKit directly.

poltergeist/PhantomJS has some big advantages over capybara-webkit:

In my experience poltergeist/PhantomJS always times out when it should, whereas capybara-webkit sometimes hangs.
Its error messages are much clearer. For example, it will actually tell you if it can't click an element that is on the page because there's another element in front of it.
It can be told to re-raise Javascript errors as test errors (by instantiating the driver with js_errors: true).
PhantomJS is much easier to install than standalone WebKit. PhantomJS provides a nearly dependency-free executable that you can download, while standalone WebKit has many OS library dependencies which you may have to upgrade or otherwise fiddle with.

Related Solutions

Rails Phantomjs, poltergeist, and Capybara not playing well together

Create a very simple test and see what happens.

simple_spec.rb

require 'spec_helper'
require 'capybara/poltergeist'
include Capybara::DSL
Capybara.javascript_driver = :poltergeist

describe 'some stuff which requires js', :js => true do
  it 'will take a screenshot' do
    visit("http://google.com")
    page.driver.render('./file.png', :full => true)
  end
end

Does that get you an image of Google?

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Rails Phantomjs, poltergeist, and Capybara not playing well together

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