Error in running a simple watir script: uninitialized constant Watir::IE (NameError)

Question

I have installed Ruby 2, devkit & Watir.

• enviroment: OS win7(64bit）
• installation files:
  
  • rubyinstaller-2.0.0-p0-x64.exe
  • DevKit-mingw64-64-4.7.2-20130224-1432-sfx.exe
• part of gem list result:
  
  • commmonwatir 4.0.0
  • watir 4.0.0
  • win32-process 0.6.6

when I running a simple script:

require 'rubygems'
require 'watir'
require 'watir-webdriver' 
ie = Watir::IE.new
ie.goto("http://www.google.com")

I am getting the following error:

uninitialized constant Watir::IE (NameError)

then I tried ie = Watir::Browser.new instead of ie = Watir::IE.new still getting error:

cannot load such file watir-classic (loaderror)

then I tried installing watir-classic, getting error again:

extconf.rb
libxml2 is missing

Can anyone please help me resolve this issue?

Answer 1

Based on the error, my guess is that watir-classic is failing to install the nokogiri gem. Nokogiri does not currently support Ruby x64 on Windows - see https://github.com/sparklemotion/nokogiri/issues/864.

Two things you could try:

1. Use 32bit Ruby (as suggested in the Nokogiri issue)

2. Use a browser other than IE. By default, Browser.new will start IE using watir-classic. Using one of the other browsers will use watir-webdriver, which I do not believe is dependent on nokogiri.

Example:

require 'watir'
browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome
browser.goto("http://www.google.com")