Rails and Selenium: how to stop/pause execution of a test in the browser?

ruby-on-rails selenium bdd
Joshua Muheim picture Joshua Muheim · Jun 20, 2012 · Viewed 14.8k times · Source

I'm having a hard (but very interesting time) diving into Behavior Driven Development using Cucumber, RSpec, Selenium, and Rails.

I have my setup ready for testing with Selenium, and it's funny to watch Firefox pop up and run automatically through my scenarios. But one thing I'd like to do is pause or stop execution at a certain point, so I can inspect what Selenium sees at a certain point.

I know of the save_and_open_page command, but this only shows me plain HTML without formatting. So maybe there is a stop_execution method or something that stops Selenium without closing the browser?

Answer

Abe Voelker picture Abe Voelker · Jul 12, 2012

Install pry, then put binding.pry in your test where you want it to pause. When you're done, press Ctrl+D or type exit in the REPL that gets opened to continue execution.

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