Web Automation with Watir

Thu, Oct 4, 2018

How I use Watir to make my life easier.

What’s Watir?

“An open source Ruby library for automating tests. Watir interacts with a browser the same way people do: clicking links, filling out forms and validating text.” - Watir

A Quick Example

Goal

Log into a page and confirm success.

Setup

$ gem install pry
$ gem install watir

Put chromedriver in a $PATH directory. Mine’s in /usr/local/bin

Workflow

I’ve found using a REPL like pry helps speed up development. Instead of incrementally adding steps to and rerunning my script, I can use Pry to get real-time feedback.

Starting the Browser & Navigating to a page

Initiate Pry

$ pry

Require watir, initiate a browser, and navigate to a page.

require 'watir'
$b = Watir::Browser.new
=> #<Watir::Browser:0x..f8f7739e910ec7622 url="data:," title="">
$b.goto('http://testing-ground.scraping.pro/login')

Locating & Interacting with Elements

Using the DOM, I realized the user/pass fields had an ID

username_field = $b.text_field id: 'usr'
password_field = $b.text_field id: 'pwd'
sign_in = $b.button value:'Login'
username_field.set 'admin'
password_field.set '12345'
sign_in.click

Reading the Page

There are various ways to do this. I’ll be getting the raw HTML of the page, which is returned as a string, and see if it includes the success element.

$b.html.include? '<h3 class="success">WELCOME :)</h3>'
=> true

You did it!

My Watir Use Cases

Bumping forum threads with an 8 hour bump limit - Gist
Automatic Runescape account creation. Utilizes captcha solving with 2Captcha API & multithreading - Gist
Data scraping & exporting to Google Sheets with text notifications utilizing Twillio API - Gist

AakLak