Cucumber vs Capybara - testing

Question

Can someone explain the difference between these two platforms?
Are both part of BDD but why should I use one or other, or both together?

Answer 1

Capybara is a tool that interacts with a website the way a human would (like visiting a url, clicking a link, typing text into a form and submitting it). It is used to emulate a user's flow through a website. With Capybara you can write something like this:
describe "the signup process", :type => :feature do
before :each do
User.make(:email => 'user#example.com', :password => 'caplin')
end
it "signs me in" do
visit '/sessions/new'
within("#session") do
fill_in 'Login', :with => 'user#example.com'
fill_in 'Password', :with => 'password'
end
click_link 'Sign in'
page.should have_content 'Success'
end
end
Cucumber is a tool to write human-readable tests that are mapped into code. With it, you can rewrite the above example like this:
Scenario: Signup process
Given a user exists with email "user#example.com" and password "caplin"
When I try to login with "user#example.com" and "caplin"
Then I should be logged in successfully
The almost plain-text interpretation is useful to pass around non-developers but also need some code mapped into it to actually work (the step definitions).
Usually you will use Capybara if you're testing a website and use Cucumber if you need to share those tests with non-developers. These two conditions are independent so you can use one without the other or both or none.
PS: in the code snippet there is some RSpec as well. This is needed because Cucumber or Capybara by themselves cannot test something. They rely on RSpec, Test::Unit or minitest to do the actual "Pass or Fail" work.

Answer 2

cucumber is a BDD tool that expresses testing scenarios in a business-readable, domain-specific language.
capybara is an automated testing tool (often used) for ROR applications.
On the capybara github page, there's an example on using capybara with cucumber.

Answer 3

Cucumber is a general-purpose BDD tool. It knows nothing about web apps. So Cucumber step definitions call Capybara in order to test web apps.

Answer 4

|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Cucumber | Capybara |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Test cases are more readable | Test cases are not readable; |
| and written in plain english | Capybara also wraps RSpec and |
| text as a DSL | you follow the same pattern to|
| | write test cases |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Easy to iterate data using | Not easy to iterate data |
| tables | |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Cucumber has its own runner | Uses RSpec runner to execute |
| | tests |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Default HTML reporter | No default HTML reporter |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Need to learn cucumber regex | No such concept |
| pattern to write step- | |
| definition which is the middle| |
| man for test case and script. | |
| Btw, the regex pattern is not | |
| essential for all cases. | |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| You can use the native | (Wrapper)/Built on top of |
| selenium-webdriver methods | selenium-webdriver ruby |
| while using Cucumber; Cucumber| library when used with |
| is just an additional | selenium; it can also be used |
| framework to your generic | with two other drivers. |
| automation framework | |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|
| Pure BDD framework (In theory | Traditional functional test |
| BDD sounds great. In practice,| model for end-to-end testing |
| product owners and developers | |
| rarely continue to use BDD) | |
|-------------------------------|-------------------------------|