capybara-webkit

Earlier this month I wrote an ETL extractor using Capybara & headless browser (to work-around a lack of API - PS: only do that as a last resort!). One thing I learned and wanted to warn about here is that Chrome headless currently doesn't support file downloads [1]. PhantomJS won't work either (unless you use a custom build) [2]. I also tried with capybara-webkit, but no luck either [3]. The only driver which ultimately allowed me to download files at this point was Selenium + Firefox (with some tweaking on profile options browser.download.dir, browser.download.folderList = 2, browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk set to the MIME type of files to be downloaded). [1] https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=696481 [2] https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/issues/10052 [3] https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara-webkit/issues/691

I'd recommend just making yourself pick up a project, and run with it. Try not to over think it, and if you start to feel paralyzed, just say "fuck it, I'll do it the first, shittiest way that comes to mind." As an example, the first "real" project I wrote in Haskell was one or two weeks into learning it: a web testing framework/DSL (a la Capybara[0]) that spoke a (custom) protocol over socket to a headless webkit instance[1]. Looking back, I abused stuff like type-classes and such, but then again, it was all a learning experience. I should probably be a little embarrassed about how I left the project, but in the interest of providing some inspiration, here it is in all its gory -- I mean, glory: https://github.com/cstrahan/happybara [0]: http://teamcapybara.github.io/capybara/ [1]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara-webkit/tree/maste

I would look at Capybara before using webdriver directly in Ruby. With Capybara, with one line of code, you can change from using webdriver, to using the native rack driver, or a full headless browser setup like capybara-webkit, or akephalos for headless httpunit (which runs javascript). https://github.com/jnicklas/capybara drivers: https://github.com/thoughtbot/capybara-webkit https://github.com/bernerdschaefer/akephalos