How to Run Selenium (Used Through Capybara) at a Lower Speed

Why do my feature tests start slowly with Rails, Selenium and Spring?

Capybara needs to start up its own copy of your app in a separate thread for testing purposes. That start up time, combined with the first request probably triggering asset compilation (assets are compiled in test mode not in dev mode) is what you are seeing.

Rspec+Capybara optionally change JS driver

Never ended up finding an answer for this, so here's the hacky solution I came up with:

The only thing I found that I could reliably change was the tagging system. So I call using -t visual tag and then take it away.

In spec/spec_helper.rb

Rspec.configure do |config|
  if config.filter_manager.inclusions[:visual]
    Capybara.javascript_driver = :selenium
    config.filter_manager.inclusions.delete(:visual)
  else
    Capybara.javascript_driver = :poltergeist
  end

~rest of rspec config code~

Now you can run your tests with rspec (tests to run) -t visual
The main problem with this is that it will prevent you from running specific tests. You can still do a single file with rspec spec/features/signup_spec.rb -t visual but you cannot add a :54 to run at a specific line number.

Capybara Selenium WebDriver does not see my test data

Changing my database_cleaner.rb file to this fixed the issue, they are no longer running in two different threads.

RSpec.configure do |config|
  config.use_transactional_fixtures = false

  config.before :each do
    if Capybara.current_driver == :rack_test
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :transaction
    else
      DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation
    end
    DatabaseCleaner.start
  end

  config.after do
    DatabaseCleaner.clean
  end
end

Rspec+Capybara optionally change JS driver

Never ended up finding an answer for this, so here's the hacky solution I came up with:

The only thing I found that I could reliably change was the tagging system. So I call using -t visual tag and then take it away.

In spec/spec_helper.rb

Rspec.configure do |config|
  if config.filter_manager.inclusions[:visual]
    Capybara.javascript_driver = :selenium
    config.filter_manager.inclusions.delete(:visual)
  else
    Capybara.javascript_driver = :poltergeist
  end

~rest of rspec config code~

Now you can run your tests with rspec (tests to run) -t visual
The main problem with this is that it will prevent you from running specific tests. You can still do a single file with rspec spec/features/signup_spec.rb -t visual but you cannot add a :54 to run at a specific line number.

Comparison of capybara-webkit vs selenium-webdriver

You're confusing a few things here. Capybara is a testing framework/DSL, for Ruby, which can be used with any of the test runner frameworks (RSpec, Minitest, etc). It can use a number a of different drivers to communicate with the web app being tested.

The default driver is rack_test which doesn't support any JS and cannot connect to any addresses outside the app under test.

A second driver option is selenium-webdriver which can control multiple different real browsers firefox/chrome/safari/etc. for testing, and can connect to any valid URL. The downside of using selenium-webdriver as the driver is that it opens a real browser and is therefore usually slower with a larger memory footprint.

Another driver option is capybara-webkit which is headless and can also connect to any valid URL. It is generally faster than using selenium however as it is built on an old version of QtWebkit it doesn't support newer web standards (ES2015, etc) so at a minimum you need to make sure all JS is transpiled to ES5 maximum.

There is nothing to stop you using different drivers for different tests to get the benefits of speed for most tests and then use a real browser for tests that need things like WebRTC, etc. The Capybara README details how to do that when using different test runners (RSpec, Minitest, etc)

delete cookies using capybara webkit

You can use clear_cookies method:

page.driver.browser.clear_cookies

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