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Lucas Caton

Replacing Selenium with Poltergeist

Lucas Caton

Lucas Caton

@lucascaton
Poltergeist
My friend @pellegrino gave me an awesome tip: to replace "Selenium" with "Poltergeist". For those who don't know, Poltergeist is a PhantomJS driver for Capybara. I've done it in some projects and it works very well!
In order to do it, include the gem to your Gemfile:
ruby
gem 'poltergeist'
Update your Capybara configuration:
ruby
Capybara.configure do |config|
  # config.javascript_driver = :selenium
  config.javascript_driver = :poltergeist
end
Run the specs!
If you are testing some confirm() JavaScript method and you have a code similar to page.driver.browser.switch_to.alert.accept, you'll get this error:
ruby
undefined method `switch_to'
While I was trying to fix it, I found out that Poltergeist always returns true from window.confirm. There's no way (at the moment) to make it return false, but at least it won't prevent your test from passing: all I had to do was to remove that particular line and it solved the issue.
This is the results from the first project I've migrated:
  • Before: Finished in 1 minute 35.45 seconds
  • After: Finished in 41.03 seconds
Hope you find it helpful as I did!

Post updated at 02/10/2017, 10:00:00