Interactive Ruby Shell

My current project uses Ruby and has a web testing component to it. The obvious choice for testing a web application with Ruby would be Selenium-WebDriver.

If you are familiar with Ruby you should be familiar with the Interactive Ruby Shell or irb.

If I enter irb at a command prompt I am placed at the Interactive Ruby Shell:

1.9.3-p547 :001 > 

Once you are at the Interactive Ruby Shell you can try things to see how they work. In a compiled language like Java you would have to compile the code into class files then execute them. With Ruby you can actually type the lines out and see what happens immediately. For example, to do the basic Selenium example I can enter:

require 'selenium-webdriver'
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for :chrome

At this point a chrome browser should open. If it does not possible problems might be if chromedriver isn't in your PATH. Before you open the command prompt make sure that chromedriver is in your PATH. If it is in the PATH and you run irb then the Ruby code above should open a Chrome browser. It also assumes you have Chrome installed.

Once the browser opens you can do:

driver.methods - Object.methods

All objects in Ruby have a methods method. All objects also inherit Object. So the line above says to give me all the methods for driver and subtract all the Object methods from the list. So what will remain are the Selenium WebDriver methods:

 => [:save_screenshot, :screenshot_as, :action, :mouse, :keyboard, :navigate, :switch_to, :manage, :get, :current_url, :title, :page_source, :quit, :close, :window_handles, :window_handle, :execute_script, :execute_async_script, :first, :all, :script, :[], :browser, :capabilities, :ref, :find_element, :find_elements]

From this list I can see all the things I can do with driver, an instance of Selenium WebDriver. So now that I have an instance of WebDriver and I have the browser open I can enter:

driver.get 'http://www.google.com'
text_field = driver.find_element :id => 'gbqfq'
text_field.send_keys 'Selenium'
puts driver.title
driver.quit

As I type these lines I will see the browser switch to http://www.google.com, sending the text 'Selenium' to the browser and the browser closing (driver.quit).