Automated testing that doesn’t hurt

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.)

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24 thoughts on “Automated testing that doesn’t hurt”

umair on August 7, 2010 at 5:26 am said:

Watir definitely rocks..I haven’t used such a tool before.

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- Imprimante on October 5, 2011 at 6:31 pm said:
  
  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.
  
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n3ds on August 28, 2010 at 10:58 pm said:

Love using Watir.

Ease of Ruby + Ease of Watir = Great freakin’ web apps!

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suren on October 13, 2010 at 11:30 am said:

Brilliant..very reliable with the web GUI elements and very powerful with the backend capabilities…love it.

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Max Headroom on January 21, 2011 at 7:26 am said:

Like you say at the top – “Watir Rocks”! It seems that Watir and Ruby were a marriage made in heaven!

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Roshan on February 11, 2011 at 9:03 pm said:

great way to test browser support.

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Linda Li on April 6, 2011 at 1:02 am said:

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.

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Swapnil Harsh on May 17, 2011 at 8:21 am said:

Very easy tool & take very less effort but produce attractive results…..love WATIR!!!

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karthik mr on June 4, 2011 at 7:57 am said:

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!

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Adan on July 28, 2011 at 6:56 pm said:

WatiR, we enjoy using WatiR, we promote it all the companies, and use it for own projects.

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Amit Bhardwaj on August 24, 2011 at 5:28 pm said:

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.

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ahmphotos on September 7, 2011 at 5:46 pm said:

WATIR is the best automation tool I’ve tried, combined with the power of Ruby it just works!

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Girish Baldania on September 10, 2011 at 12:56 am said:

Funny as it may seem….Even HP appears in users list of WATIR :)

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Guy Ndjeng on September 22, 2011 at 6:29 am said:

Watir Rocks… just like Ruby!!

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Chandoo on October 3, 2011 at 11:03 pm said:

Such a nice tool!. So easy to use.

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Bret Pettichord (@bpettichord) on October 18, 2011 at 12:49 pm said:

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.

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3 on October 22, 2011 at 6:38 pm said:

Watir is perfect for my needs having moved over from Fakeapp which lacks any support from its developers.

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king on December 7, 2011 at 1:20 am said:

who can tell me where i can download 2.0 version?

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- Željko Filipin on December 7, 2011 at 6:53 pm said:
  
  Take a look at this page: watir.com/installation/
  
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himanshu on February 22, 2012 at 3:24 pm said:

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.

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- Alister Scott on February 22, 2012 at 3:32 pm said:
  
  Watir is Windows only. Try watir-webdriver at watirwebdriver.com
  
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  - himanshu on February 22, 2012 at 3:37 pm said:
    
    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
    
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ramakant sharma on March 5, 2012 at 10:01 pm said:

Hi,
How to install watir on IE 8 ??

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- chuckvdl on March 29, 2012 at 2:36 am said:
  
  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.
  
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Watir.com

Web Application Testing in Ruby