Capybara VS shoulda-matchers

Compare Capybara vs shoulda-matchers and see what are their differences.

Capybara

Acceptance test framework for web applications (by teamcapybara)

shoulda-matchers

Simple one-liner tests for common Rails functionality (by thoughtbot)
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Capybara shoulda-matchers
20 5
9,946 3,465
0.3% 0.2%
7.7 8.3
about 19 hours ago 6 days ago
Ruby Ruby
MIT License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

Capybara

Posts with mentions or reviews of Capybara. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-11.
  • 16 Best Ruby Frameworks For Web Development [2024]
    6 projects | dev.to | 11 Mar 2024
    Cuba takes help from a lot of other technologies to bring the best of everything. For example, the responses in Cuba are the optimized version of the Rack responses. The templates are integrated via Tilt and testing via Cutest and Capybara.
  • 🩰 Scheduling automated tests
    4 projects | dev.to | 1 Sep 2023
    I am going to use a browser based testing tool called Playwright (But you could use Capybara, or Selenium WebDriver etc.).
  • Building GitHub with Ruby on Rails
    11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Apr 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 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

  • Minitest vs. RSpec in Rails
    3 projects | dev.to | 5 Oct 2022
    Since the Capybara library drives the underlying tests, Minitest also has the same syntax.
  • Is it a common practice to test JS code in a browser instead of Node.js?
    2 projects | /r/AskProgramming | 12 Sep 2022
  • From partials to ViewComponents: writing reusable front-end code in Rails
    11 projects | dev.to | 3 Jun 2022
    The nice thing about partial templates is that templates are unit-testable with View specs (or similarly in Minitest) and the rendered output can even be verified using Capybara matchers.
  • Tip: if you're changing all your form_for to form_with, take the opportunity to make sure all forms are being tested.
    2 projects | /r/rails | 11 Apr 2022
    To piggyback: This would be a type of browser test, so you would want to use something like Cypress (https://github.com/testdouble/cypress-rails) or Capybara (https://github.com/teamcapybara/capybara). RSpec has a good integration with Capybara. Cypress is JS-based so it will require some additional config.
  • How to use undocumented web APIs
    10 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2022
  • Don't make me think, or why I switched to Rails from JavaScript SPAs
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Feb 2022
  • The Benefits of Acceptance Testing
    4 projects | dev.to | 18 Nov 2021
    For instance, the acceptance test above requires a log in routine. Here's where the expressive power of a DSL like Capybara manifests:

shoulda-matchers

Posts with mentions or reviews of shoulda-matchers. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-12-20.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Capybara and shoulda-matchers you can also consider the following projects:

Playwright - Playwright is a framework for Web Testing and Automation. It allows testing Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API.

Aruba - Test command-line applications with Cucumber-Ruby, RSpec or Minitest.

Emoji-RSpec - Custom Emoji Formatters for RSpec

Cucumber - A home for issues that are common to multiple cucumber repositories

RSpec - RSpec meta-gem that depends on the other components

Bacon - a small RSpec clone

stimulus-use - A collection of composable behaviors for your Stimulus Controllers

Spinach - Spinach is a BDD framework on top of Gherkin.

minitest - minitest provides a complete suite of testing facilities supporting TDD, BDD, mocking, and benchmarking.

Pundit Matchers - A set of RSpec matchers for testing Pundit authorisation policies.

Howitzer - A Ruby-based framework for acceptance testing