Capybara: Quick checking for element presence (without retries or timeout)

Element finding is a central feature of Capybara. Since #find is normally used to get elements from the current page and interact with them, it's a good thing that some Capybara drivers (e.g. Selenium) will wait an amount of time until the expected element shows up. But if Capybara cannot #find it at all, you'll get an error.

if page.find('.that-element')
  # Do something
else
  # Never happens because #find raises
end

In order to simply check whether an element is present, without errors raised, you can use #has_css?. It will return a Boolean – but will wait as well. If the element does not exist, it will take the configured Capybara.default_max_wait_time for this check to return false, which is usually several seconds.

The same goes for the other direction and for #all:

• has_no_css? returns true as soon as the element is gone, but false only after the full wait time if the element is there.
• Since Capybara 3, all waits for a first match, so all('.that-element').empty? takes the full wait time whenever nothing matches.

In a shared helper that branches on the state of the page, this quickly adds up to minutes per test run.

The solution is to disable the waiting for just that check:

if page.has_css?('.that-element', wait: 0)
  # Do something
else
  # Do something else
end

page.has_no_css?('.that-element', wait: 0)
page.all('.that-element', wait: false).empty?

Important

If you opt-out of Capybara's retry mechanism you need to retry yourself or your test will be flaky.

..or use a pre-existing matcher depending on your use case:

expect(page).to have_no_css('.that-element')        # ✅ returns as soon as the element is gone 
expect(page.has_css?('.that-element')).to eq(false) # ❌ waits the full time whenever it passes

Note the wait: 0 argument. Actually there is a host of options Show archive.org snapshot worth knowing (scroll down to the "Options Hash" section).