Watir, pronounced water, is an open-source (BSD) family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. It supports your app no matter what technology it is developed in. They support Internet Explorer on Windows, Firefox and Chrome on Windows, Mac and Linux.

This is the meta-gem for installing all necessary dependencies and having a convenient way to switch between different Watir drivers.

Currently supported drivers are:

• watir-classic
• watir-webdriver

Visit Watir website or refer to each gem's own README and documentation for better understanding of how to use these libraries.

• watir-rails for using Watir with Rails.
• watir-rspec for writing your tests with RSpec.
• watir-robot for using Watir with Robot Framework.
• watir-timecop for making Watir compatible with Timecop.

• page-object
• test-page
• test-factory
• watirmark
• watirsome

• watir-webdriver-performance for monitoring web application performance.
• watir-scroll for scrolling emulation
• watir-dom-wait for element waiting based on DOM change
• watir-get-image-content for getting image content
• watir-extensions-element-screenshot for making screenshot of specific element

Add it into your Gemfile:

gem "watir", "~>4.0"

Or install it manually with the following command:

gem install watir

Then in your test file:

require "watir"
browser = Watir::Browser.new

The command above will use watir-classic with Internet Explorer on Windows and watir-webdriver with Firefox on Linux/OS X by default.

There are multiple ways to specify a different driver.

By specifying different browser via #initialize:

require "watir"
# will use watir-webdriver with Chrome
browser = Watir::Browser.new :chrome

By specifying driver manually via Watir.driver#=:

require "watir"
# will use watir-webdriver with Internet Explorer
Watir.driver = :webdriver
browser = Watir::Browser.new :ie

Or by using an environment variable WATIR_DRIVER:

require "watir"
# will use watir-classic
ENV["WATIR_DRIVER"] = "classic"
browser = Watir::Browser.new

Currently it is possible to use only one driver per Ruby process. All the methods to switch between drivers won't have any effect after you've opened your first browser window.

See LICENSE for details.