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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.
Pros of Capybara
- Best acceptance test framework for Ruby on Rails apps12
- Synchronous with Rack::Test2
- Fast with Rack::Test1
Pros of Laravel Homestead
- Easy to setup19
- Native enviroment13
- Cool if you finally get it set up 4 Win10 by night Devs1
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Cons of Capybara
- Hard to make reproducible tests when using with browser1