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teamcapybara
capybara
Ruby2011–2023
teamcapybara / capybara

capybara

Acceptance test framework for web applications

Web DevelopmentTesting & Quality
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
16Distinct people
17Mentions
1Explicit recommenders
10.2KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Acceptance test framework for web applications

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

I recommend having a look at capybara [0]. It is build on top of nokogiri, and is actually a tool to write acceptence tests. But it can also be used for web scraping: you can…

wnm used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year17 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2011-02-07 21:52:08 UTC to 2023-04-07 12:02:48 UTC.

012342011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20112012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments20172018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2023

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20112011-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20122012-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

17 sources
compumike·Apr 7, 2023
Even as a much smaller team, building Heii On-Call [0] as a lightweight alerting/monitoring/on-call rotations SaaS based on Ruby on Rails has basically been a pleasure! And as the article highlights, perhaps the key reason for smooth deployments and upgrades is that the CI testing story is so, so good: RSpec [1] plus Capybara [2] for us. That means we have decently extensive tests of just about all behavior. The few small Rails and Ruby upgrades we've done have gone quite smoothly and confidently, with usually just a few non-Rails gem dependencies needing to be manually updated as well. The "microservices" story is where we've pulled in the Crystal programming language [3] to great effect. After dabbling with Go and Rust, we've found that Crystal is truly a breath of fresh air. Crystal powers the parts of Heii On-Call that need to be fast
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and low-RAM, specifically the inbound API https://api.heiioncall.com/ and the outbound HTTP(S) prober background processes. I've ported some shared utility classes from Ruby to Crystal almost completely by just copy-and-pasting ___.rb to ___.cr; porting the tests for those classes was far more onerous than porting the class code itself. (Perhaps another point of evidence toward the superiority of RoR's testing story...) The front-end story is nice but just a bit weaker. Using Hotwire / Turbo successfully, but I have an open PR to fix a fairly obvious stale cache bug in Turbo [4] that has been sitting unloved for nearly a month, despite other users reporting the same issue. I'm hopeful that it will get merged in the next release, but definitely less active than the backend side. For me, the key conclusion is that the excellent Ruby on Rails testing story is what enables everything to go a lot more smoothly and have such a strong foundation. I'd be curious if any GitHubbers can talk more about whether they too are using Rspec+Capybara or something else? Are there internal guidelines for test coverage? [0] https://heiioncall.com/ [1] https://rspec.info/ [2] https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara [3] https://crystal-lang.org/ [4] https://github.com/hotwired/turbo/pull/895
In Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
sergeykish·Jun 1, 2020
I've recently reported bug on Xmonad github, they have ### Checklist - [ ] I've read [CONTRIBUTING.md](https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) - [ ] I tested my configuration with [xmonad-testing](https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad-testing) I think it is brilliant idea, immediately checked latest git versions, I assume you may add - [ ] I tested my application with [latest stable requirements.txt](...) And something about triangulation and reporting to another repo too. Sorry to hear about breaks on major version. Ruby gems (libraries) freeze dependencies on major, sometimes minor, example [0]. But applications shipped with Gemfile and Gemfile.lock [1], [2]. So `bundle install` is reproducible [3]: > The presence of a `Gemfile.lock` in a gem's repository ensures that a fresh checkout of the repository uses the
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exact same set of dependencies every time. We believe this makes repositories more friendly towards new and existing contributors. Ideally, anyone should be able to clone the repo, run `bundle install`, and have passing tests. If you don't check in your `Gemfile.lock`, new contributors can get different versions of your dependencies, and run into failing tests that they don't know how to fix. Yes, docker, msi, Flatpack, AppImage - whatever works for you and your users. It is sad we can't easily statically compile in one file on scripting languages. [0] https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara/blob/master/capybar... [1] https://github.com/Shopify/example-ruby-app/blob/master/Gemf... [2] https://github.com/Shopify/example-ruby-app/blob/master/Gemf... [3] https://bundler.io/guides/faq.html
In Overview of Python dependency management tools
toasterlovin·May 12, 2016
I've had a lot of success scraping websites with Capybara [1]. It's intended for writing acceptance tests of web apps, but it works remarkably well for scraping websites. It's written in Ruby, but the DSL it provides for interacting with web pages should be pretty understandable to anybody who's programmed before. It also supports multiple browsers, which means you can tradeoff along these axes: - Headless vs. Not - JS support vs. Not I put a repo together with a sample script [2] for scraping leads off of a website which I will not name, but whose name rhymes with 'help'. It uses the PhantomJS browser for headless JS support. It also includes a Vagrantfile so you can avoid installing all the dependencies on your local machine. [1]: https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara [2]: https://github.com/toasterlovin/scraping-yalp
In RoboBrowser: Your friendly neighborhood web scraper
seanp2k2·May 12, 2016
You can record tests in Selenium or something like Capybara and replay them using something like PhantomJS, which is a headless browser-like JS execution environment that does things like generate a would-be DOM: https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara You can also use Selenium tests with things like https://www.browserstack.com/automate , where TL;DR they run your selenium test on dozens of browser + platform combinations and send you the results, like screenshots and any javascript errors. If you're familiar with CI stuff, you can see how powerful this has the potential to be. It's non-trivial but very possible to run your own cluster of selenium nodes as well; check out the official Selenium Grid: http://www.seleniumhq.org/projects/grid/
In RoboBrowser: Your friendly neighborhood web scraper
pmontra·Jul 22, 2015
Ruby's Capybara encapsulates Selenium and waits until elements appear on the page (the default timeout is 2 seconds). So you can write simple sequential code like click_link('bar') expect(page).to have_content('baz') and it will work even if the baz element is injected into the page by an Ajax request to the server triggered by clicking on bar. I've been using it for many years but I didn't check how they implement it. Maybe a callback from a MutationObserver? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs... Documentation at https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara#asynchronous-javascript...
In How to make Selenium tests reliable, scalable, and maintainable
wnm·Jan 19, 2015Recommendation phrase
I recommend having a look at capybara [0]. It is build on top of nokogiri, and is actually a tool to write acceptence tests. But it can also be used for web scraping: you can open websites, click on links, fill in forms, find elements on a page (via xpath or css), get their values, etc... I prefer it over nokogiri because of its nice DSL and good documentation [1]. It also can execute javascript, which sometimes is handy for scraping. I've spend a lot of time working on web scrapers for two of my projects, http://themescroller.com (dead) and http://www.remoteworknewsletter.com, and I think the holy grail is to build a rails app around your scraper. You can write your scrapers as libs, and then make them executable as rake tasks, or even cronjobs. And because its a rails app you can save all scraped data as actual models and have them pers
Read the rest
isted in a database. With rails its also super easy to build an api around your data, or build a quick backend for it via rails scaffolds. [0] https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara [1] http://www.rubydoc.info/github/jnicklas/capybara/
In Web scraping with Ruby

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