Last week the Capybara project released version 0.4. Since the 0.3.9 release, which added support for third-party drivers, I’ve been working on turning Terminus into fully compatible driver for it. It’s still an experiment but it’s in the sort of semi-useful state that means I’m okay throwing it out to see if anyone’s interested in it.

So what is it? Terminus is a Capybara driver where most of the driver functions are implemented in client-side JavaScript. It lets you script any browser on any machine using the Capybara API, without any browser plugins or extensions. ‘Any browser’ really means ‘any browser that supports the document.evaluate() XPath API’ for now, so you can’t use IE, but the ‘any machine’ part is true: any browser that can see your development machine can be controlled using Terminus, including any phone, iPad or desktop machine on your local network.

This is very much still an experiment. Because every little Capybara call has to go over the network (it uses Faye to send commands to browsers) it’s very slow, and the connection sometimes flakes out. Under ideal circumstances though it does pass most of the Capybara test suite. It supports JavaScript, cookies and window switching (assuming the connected browser has these features enabled). The major omissions are:

• attach_file does not work since file uploads cannot be controlled by JavaScript for security reasons.
• A few selectors and HTML5 features in the specs don’t work due to browser inconsistencies.
• Redirects work but infinite redirection cannot be detected.

The original intention was for Terminus to be a tool for automating cross-browser testing, so the lack of IE support is kind of a problem. I actually went some way towards fixing this; I wrote a pretty stupid document.evaluate() replacement called Pathology, and to support that a PEG parser compiler called Canopy so I could write a declarative XPath grammar. Unfortunately these don’t yet perform well enough to support the workload that Capybara throws at a browser.

I also want to add an API for switching browsers based on vendor and OS versions, but this release is just enough to support the required Capybara API.

You can find out more on the project’s GitHub page, and installation is the usual gem install terminus command – I’d love if a few of you could kick its tyres a bit and figure out if it’s actually useful for anything.