Capybara vs Cucumber
Let’s understand Capybara vs Cucumber. Capybara is a tool that interacts with a website the way a human would (like visiting a url, clicking a link, typing text into a form and submitting it). Certainly, it is useful to emulate a user’s flow through a website. With Capybara you can write something like this:
describe “the signup process”, :type => :feature do
before :each do
User.make(:email => ‘[email protected]’, :password => ‘caplin’)
end
it “signs me in” do
visit ‘/sessions/new’
within(“#session”) do
fill_in ‘Login’, :with => ‘[email protected]’
fill_in ‘Password’, :with => ‘password’
end
click_link ‘Sign in’
page.should have_content ‘Success’
end
end
Moreover, Capybara is an automated testing tool (often used) for ROR applications.
Cucumber
Cucumber is a BDD tool that expresses testing scenarios in a business-readable. It’s a domain-specific language. In addition, it is a general-purpose BDD tool. It knows nothing about web apps. So, Cucumber step definitions call Capybara in order to test web apps. Moreover, Cucumber is a tool to write human-readable tests that are mapped into code. With it, you can rewrite the above example like this:
Scenario: Signup process
Given a user exists with email “[email protected]” and password “caplin”
When I try to login with “[email protected]” and “caplin”
Then I should be logged in successfully
The almost plain-text interpretation is useful to pass around non-developers but also need some code mapped into it to actually work (the step definitions).
Usually you will use Capybara if you testing a website and use Cucumber if you need to share those tests with non-developers. These two conditions are independent so you can use one without the other or both or none.
In the code snippet there is some RSpec as well. This is needed because Cucumber or Capybara by themselves cannot test something. They rely on RSpec, Test::Unit or minitest to do the actual “Pass or Fail” work.
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