Watir, pronounced water, is an open-source (BSD) family of Ruby libraries for automating web browsers. It allows you to write tests that are easy to read and maintain. It is simple and flexible.
Watir drives browsers the same way people do. It clicks links, fills in forms, presses buttons. Watir also checks results, such as whether expected text appears on the page.
Watir is a family of Ruby libraries but it supports your app no matter what technology it is developed in. Whilst Watir supports only Internet Explorer on Windows, Watir-WebDriver supports Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and also running in headless mode (HTMLUnit).
Like other programming languages, Ruby gives you the power to connect to databases, read data files and spreadsheets, export XML, and structure your code as reusable libraries. Unlike other programming languages, Ruby is concise and often a joy to read.
Why Watir?
- It’s a free Open Source tool. There are no costs to use the tool.
- There’s a very active and growing community behind it.
- It uses Ruby, a full-featured modern scripting language, rather than a proprietary vendorscript.
- It supports your web app no matter what it is developed in.
- It supports multiple browsers on different platforms.
- It is powerful and easy to use, yet beautifully lightweight.
- Don’t just take our word for it, see some awesome quotes below and install Watir.
Quotes
“Watir Rocks! Truly awesome!!”—Shashank Date
“Watir is the most compelling alternative [to Fit] for filling the automated acceptance testing need.”—Ward Cunningham
“I have limited scripting experience and none with Ruby, but I was able to follow your examples and be productive in short order.”—Kevin Sheehy
“I’ve been trying to find the Holy Grail of Automated Web UI Testing… And the one I’m currently enamored with is Watir.”—Scott Hanselman
“I wanted to run around my office dancing and celebrating.”—Beth Ferguson
Watir Users
Some Watir users include:
Sorted (mostly) alphabetically. (Leave a comment below if you’d like to add your company. Please let us know how you are using Watir.)
Watir definitely rocks..I haven’t used such a tool before.
I’m using the free version of iMacro right now and is easy to use. I will give watir a try even if i never used ruby.
Love using Watir.
Ease of Ruby + Ease of Watir = Great freakin’ web apps!
Brilliant..very reliable with the web GUI elements and very powerful with the backend capabilities…love it.
Like you say at the top – “Watir Rocks”! It seems that Watir and Ruby were a marriage made in heaven!
great way to test browser support.
Watir is an excellent testing too!
LiveOps QA team uses watir for function testing and smoke testing since late 2007. We did a lot of customization for our watir end-2-end automation framework. We also use it for Daily and weekly smoke test.
Very easy tool & take very less effort but produce attractive results…..love WATIR!!!
Man! What an Awesome tool. Was the perfect tool i was looking for to develop a script for my project.Watir with Ruby lang, truely rocks.Keep goin!
WatiR, we enjoy using WatiR, we promote it all the companies, and use it for own projects.
We found it one of the most robust tools for web application testing. We are using it since last two year and formed our own library / framework to do data driven testing. Usually we use it to automate our sanity test suite. However, for couple of projects we are working on to automate our regression suite using Watir.
People says selenium is one of the most reliable open source tools for functional testing. Now, I have worked on both the tools and my personal favor goes along with Watir.
WATIR is the best automation tool I’ve tried, combined with the power of Ruby it just works!
Funny as it may seem….Even HP appears in users list of WATIR :)
Watir Rocks… just like Ruby!!
Such a nice tool!. So easy to use.
Girish: Yes, I have also heard from people who work at HP that there are many people there who prefer watir over qtp, despite it being free to them. Frankly I think that once people pay so much money for it, it makes them blind to evidence that they made a bad decision. The folks at HP don’t have that kind of bias.
Watir is perfect for my needs having moved over from Fakeapp which lacks any support from its developers.
who can tell me where i can download 2.0 version?
Take a look at this page: http://watir.com/installation/
Hello,
i am trying to run Watir on Debian (browser: icewasel). but unable to install it properly.
[require 'watir' is showing following message :
irb(main):002:0> require 'watir'
LoadError: no such file to load -- watir
from (irb):2:in `require'
from (irb):2
from :0
]
please help.
Watir is Windows only. Try watir-webdriver at http://watirwebdriver.com
i tried it :
WARNING: Invalid .gemspec format in ‘/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8/specifications/firewatir-1.9.4.gemspec’
ERROR: Error installing watir-webdriver:
multi_json requires RubyGems version >= 1.3.6
Hi,
How to install watir on IE 8 ??
Click the INSTALL image above on the right side of the page. At the top of the page that opens you will find links for various OS’s including windows.. click the link for windows.
For support post on stackoverflow.com and tag your question with the WATIR or WATIR-WEBDRIVER tag.
why hard to connect the watir.com from China?