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  5. Capybara vs Laravel Homestead

Capybara vs Laravel Homestead

OverviewComparisonAlternatives

Overview

Laravel Homestead
Laravel Homestead
Stacks277
Followers343
Votes33
GitHub Stars3.9K
Forks1.4K
Capybara
Capybara
Stacks858
Followers191
Votes15

Capybara vs Laravel Homestead: What are the differences?

Developers describe Capybara as "Acceptance test framework for web applications". Capybara helps you test web applications by simulating how a real user would interact with your app. It is agnostic about the driver running your tests and comes with Rack::Test and Selenium support built in. WebKit is supported through an external gem. On the other hand, Laravel Homestead is detailed as "The official Laravel local development environment (Vagrant box)". Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.

Capybara and Laravel Homestead are primarily classified as "Testing Frameworks" and "Virtual Machine" tools respectively.

Some of the features offered by Capybara are:

  • No setup necessary for Rails and Rack application. Works out of the box.
  • Intuitive API which mimics the language an actual user would use.
  • Switch the backend your tests run against from fast headless mode to an actual browser with no changes to your tests.

On the other hand, Laravel Homestead provides the following key features:

  • Ubuntu 14.04
  • PHP 5.6
  • HHVM

"Best acceptance test framework for Ruby on Rails apps" is the top reason why over 7 developers like Capybara, while over 18 developers mention "Easy to setup" as the leading cause for choosing Laravel Homestead.

Capybara and Laravel Homestead are both open source tools. It seems that Capybara with 8.82K GitHub stars and 1.29K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Laravel Homestead with 3.11K GitHub stars and 1.32K GitHub forks.

According to the StackShare community, Capybara has a broader approval, being mentioned in 38 company stacks & 20 developers stacks; compared to Laravel Homestead, which is listed in 20 company stacks and 24 developer stacks.

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Detailed Comparison

Laravel Homestead
Laravel Homestead
Capybara
Capybara

Laravel Homestead is an official, pre-packaged Vagrant "box" that provides you a wonderful development environment without requiring you to install PHP, HHVM, a web server, and any other server software on your local machine. Homestead runs on any Windows, Mac, or Linux system, and includes the Nginx web server, PHP 5.6, MySQL, Postgres, Redis, Memcached, and all of the other goodies you need to develop amazing Laravel applications.

Capybara helps you test web applications by simulating how a real user would interact with your app. It is agnostic about the driver running your tests and comes with Rack::Test and Selenium support built in. WebKit is supported through an external gem.

Ubuntu 14.04;PHP 5.6;HHVM;Nginx;MySQL;Postgres;Node (With Bower, Grunt, and Gulp);Redis;Memcached;Beanstalkd;Laravel Envoy;Fabric + HipChat Extension
No setup necessary for Rails and Rack application. Works out of the box.;Intuitive API which mimics the language an actual user would use.;Switch the backend your tests run against from fast headless mode to an actual browser with no changes to your tests.;Powerful synchronization features mean you never have to manually wait for asynchronous processes to complete.
Statistics
GitHub Stars
3.9K
GitHub Stars
-
GitHub Forks
1.4K
GitHub Forks
-
Stacks
277
Stacks
858
Followers
343
Followers
191
Votes
33
Votes
15
Pros & Cons
Pros
  • 19
    Easy to setup
  • 13
    Native enviroment
  • 1
    Cool if you finally get it set up 4 Win10 by night Devs
Pros
  • 12
    Best acceptance test framework for Ruby on Rails apps
  • 2
    Synchronous with Rack::Test
  • 1
    Fast with Rack::Test
Cons
  • 1
    Hard to make reproducible tests when using with browser
Integrations
Laravel
Laravel
Vagrant
Vagrant
Vagrant Cloud
Vagrant Cloud
Rails
Rails

What are some alternatives to Laravel Homestead, Capybara?

Robot Framework

Robot Framework

It is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development. It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.

HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)

HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance while maintaining the flexibility that PHP developers are accustomed to. To date, HHVM (and its predecessor HPHPc before it) has realized over a 9x increase in web request throughput and over a 5x reduction in memory consumption for Facebook compared with the PHP 5.2 engine + APC.

Karate DSL

Karate DSL

Combines API test-automation, mocks and performance-testing into a single, unified framework. The BDD syntax popularized by Cucumber is language-neutral, and easy for even non-programmers. Besides powerful JSON & XML assertions, you can run tests in parallel for speed - which is critical for HTTP API testing.

Cucumber

Cucumber

Cucumber is a tool that supports Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) - a software development process that aims to enhance software quality and reduce maintenance costs.

TestCafe

TestCafe

It is a pure node.js end-to-end solution for testing web apps. It takes care of all the stages: starting browsers, running tests, gathering test results and generating reports.

Spock Framework

Spock Framework

It is a testing and specification framework for Java and Groovy applications. What makes it stand out from the crowd is its beautiful and highly expressive specification language. It is compatible with most IDEs, build tools, and continuous integration servers.

Selenide

Selenide

It is a library for writing concise, readable, boilerplate-free tests in Java using Selenium WebDriver.

PHPUnit

PHPUnit

PHPUnit is a programmer-oriented testing framework for PHP. It is an instance of the xUnit architecture for unit testing frameworks.

Detox

Detox

High velocity native mobile development requires us to adopt continuous integration workflows, which means our reliance on manual QA has to drop significantly. It tests your mobile app while it's running in a real device/simulator, interacting with it just like a real user.

Azure Virtual Machines

Azure Virtual Machines

You can create Linux and Windows virtual machines. It gives you the flexibility of virtualization for a wide range of computing solutions—development and testing, running applications, and extending your datacenter. It’s the freedom of open-source software configured the way you need it.

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