How to use Capybara in pure Ruby (without Rails)?

Question

I'm trying to get Capybara running in a simple Ruby script -- i.e. without/outside of Rails. Here's the script:

require 'rubygems' require 'capybara' require 'capybara/dsl'  include Capybara  Capybara.current_driver = :selenium Capybara.app_host = 'http://www.google.com'  visit('/') 

The problem is that when I run this I get this error:

NameError: uninitialized constant Capybara::Session  at top level    in dsl.rb at line 52 method gem_original_require in custom_require.rb at line 36 method require  in custom_require.rb at line 36 at top level    in capybara_test.rb at line 3 method gem_original_require in custom_require.rb at line 31 method require  in custom_require.rb at line 31 at top level    in capybara_test.rb at line  

What am I doing wrong?

Some more info:

• Mac OS X 10.5
• ruby 1.8.6 (2009-06-08 patchlevel 369) [universal-darwin9.0]
• capybara (0.3.9)

Thanks!

Neal

Note: Per the comment from jnicklas I tried this, which matches the new README more closely:

require 'rubygems' require 'capybara' require 'capybara/dsl'  Capybara.default_driver = :selenium Capybara.app_host = 'http://www.google.com'  module MyCapybaraTest   include Capybara    def test_google     visit('/')   end end 

Unfortunately, I'm still seeing the same error:

NameError: uninitialized constant Capybara::Session 

Thoughts?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Here's something that seems to work for me:

require 'rubygems' require 'capybara' require 'capybara/dsl'  Capybara.run_server = false Capybara.current_driver = :selenium Capybara.app_host = 'http://www.google.com'  module MyCapybaraTest   class Test     include Capybara::DSL     def test_google       visit('/')     end   end end  t = MyCapybaraTest::Test.new t.test_google 

Answer 2

It goes to show that even incorrect documentation lives forever. The Capybara README used to recommend to include Capybara in the global namespace, this is a really bad idea, and messes up any number of random things. You should include Capybara in your own module or class and use that instead.

Check out the README for current best practices.