How to run your feature specs using Capybara and Headless Chrome

Enjoy faster testing!

Google has recently announced a way to run the Chrome browser in a headless environment. If you're using Capybara gem, you can easily start using headless Chrome. Without further ado, let's do it:

Make sure you have one of the following Chrome versions:

57+ on Linux
59+ on macOS
60+ on Windows

Add (or update) the gem selenium-webdriver;
Make sure you're using ChromeDriver version 2.30 or higher. You can install it by running:

brew install chromedriver on macOS;
apt-get install chromium-chromedriver on Debian/Ubuntu Linux.

Add the following driver to your spec/support/capybara.rb, spec/spec_helper.rb, or spec/rails_helper.rb:

ruby

Capybara.javascript_driver = :selenium_chrome_headless

Or, if you need to use some custom options:

ruby

Capybara.register_driver :chrome do |app|
  Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new app, browser: :chrome,
    options: Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new(args: %w[headless disable-gpu])
end

Capybara.javascript_driver = :chrome

Done, enjoy headless Chrome! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

You might get a warning like the following:

bash

WARN Selenium [DEPRECATION] :args or :switches is deprecated. Use Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options#add_argument instead.

Make sure you don't have another registered driver, I made this mistake myself and had an iphone driver, which was passing args in the old way and turned out to be the reason why I was getting the warning.

Post updated at 16/04/2018, 07:00:00

Google has recently announced a way to run the Chrome browser in a headless environment. If you're using Capybara gem, you can easily start using headless Chrome. Without further ado, let's do it:

Make sure you have one of the following Chrome versions:

57+ on Linux
59+ on macOS
60+ on Windows

Add (or update) the gem selenium-webdriver;
Make sure you're using ChromeDriver version 2.30 or higher. You can install it by running:

brew install chromedriver on macOS;
apt-get install chromium-chromedriver on Debian/Ubuntu Linux.

Add the following driver to your spec/support/capybara.rb, spec/spec_helper.rb, or spec/rails_helper.rb:

ruby

Capybara.javascript_driver = :selenium_chrome_headless

Or, if you need to use some custom options:

ruby

Capybara.register_driver :chrome do |app|
  Capybara::Selenium::Driver.new app, browser: :chrome,
    options: Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options.new(args: %w[headless disable-gpu])
end

Capybara.javascript_driver = :chrome

Done, enjoy headless Chrome! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

You might get a warning like the following:

bash

WARN Selenium [DEPRECATION] :args or :switches is deprecated. Use Selenium::WebDriver::Chrome::Options#add_argument instead.