Watir from Ruby on Rails controller - ruby-on-rails

Question

I have the requirement to run a Watir test code from the Ruby on Rails framework. My ruby on rails hello world works perfectly and so does my Watir test (when i run from the irb and when run as an individial ruby script ) , but my requirement is to call the watir code from within the rails controller, which is giving a cannot Load Watir error.
This requirement is very urgent, and i can't figure out what the error is.
Note: The rails application is run on the netbeans 6.9 IDE and uses the native ruby interpreter in the system (not the default jruby)
I have the following versions:
ruby : 1.9.3
watir : 3.0.0
Rails : 3.2.8
LoadError (cannot load such file -- Watir):
app/controllers/watir_controller.rb:4:in `<class:WatirController>'
app/controllers/watir_controller.rb:1:in `<top (required)>'
This is my controller class which calls the watir script:
class WatirController < ApplicationController
## the Watir controller
require 'rubygems'
require 'watir'
# set a variable
test_site = "http://www.google.com"
# open the IE browser
ie = Watir::IE.new
# print some comments
puts "Beginning of test: Google search."
puts " Step 1: go to the test site: " + test_site
ie.goto test_site
puts " Step 2: enter 'pickaxe' in the search text field."
ie.text_field(:name, "q").set "pickaxe" # "q" is the name of the search field
#puts " Step 3: click the 'Google Search' button."
ie.button(:name, "btnG").click # "btnG" is the name of the Search button
puts " Expected Result:"
puts " A Google page with results should be shown. 'Programming Ruby' should be high on the list."
puts " Actual Result:"
if ie.text.include? "Programming Ruby"
puts " Test Passed. Found the test string: 'Programming Ruby'. Actual Results match Expected Results."
else
puts " Test Failed! Could not find: 'Programming Ruby'."
end
puts "End of test: Google search."
end

Answer 1

I don't understand as to why you need to use Watir inside of your Rails controller?
Watir is for browser automation to test things out which means that you should put it into your test/spec directory and put watir to the Gemfile into development and test group like this:
group :development, :test do
gem "watir"
end
Since you're using Rails and you probably would test the application written in Rails then i'd also recommend to use watir-rails. Also, if you're using RSpec, use watir-rspec. This means that your Gemfile should look like this:
group :development, :test do
gem "watir-rails"
gem "watir-rspec"
end

Answer 2

You have to include it in your gem file.
Gemfile
gem 'watir'
controller
class MyApp::WebCrawlerController
require "watir"
require "nokogiri"
def index
browser = Watir::Browser.new
browser.goto 'http://www.google.com'
doc = Nokogiri::HTML.parse(browser.html)
end
end