What profile does Selenium WebDriver use by default?

Question

Where does Selenium WebDriver (a.k.a Selenium 2) get the anonymous profile that it uses when it opens FirefoxDriver? If it used the default for Firefox, %appdata%/roaming/mozilla/firefox/profiles, then if I were to disable a firefox plugin, it should be disabled for Selenium WebDriver also, so why isn't it?

Cognizant

AFAIK it's always a brand new one. You should just create your own and modify it to your needs. – Manzanares

ok its a brand new one, but it is still basing it on some prototype stored on a computer, since it is remembering to start up an addon that was since disabled within firefox. Where is this prototype? – Cognizant

I guess it's the one firefox provides, if you specify the -CreateProfile option on the command line. e.g. firefox -CreateProfile test. So what you are asking for is rather a firefox question, than a selenium one. I still recommend just to create a new Profile using the Profile Manager, e.g. firefox.exe -ProfileManager – Manzanares

In the headless case install / start something like xvfb (framebuffer server) and you will be able to use DISPLAY=:11.0 firefox -CreateProfile test. – Antidromic

Answer 1

I will answer it, supporting comment from @twall: When starting firefox in Selenium 2 WebDriver, it starts new, anonymous profile.

However, if you want to change it, you can create new Firefox profile and name it somehow, you know what it is - e.g. SELENIUM

Then in your code do this:

 ProfilesIni profile = new ProfilesIni();
 FirefoxProfile ffprofile = profile.getProfile("SELENIUM");
 WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(ffprofile);

That way, Firefox will always start that profile. In the profile you do all the settings you need

Orchardman

What kind of code is this? I.e., I'm using selenium in Rails via the capybara and selenium-webdriver gems. – Dynasty

can i use this profile the way i used several user logins by using single browsers? @PavelJanicek – Debauchery

Answer 2

You can assign to each Selenium grid 2 node a specific firefox profile:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.37.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.profile=my-profile -role node -hub http://example-server.org:4444/grid/register

Notice that the value of the webdriver.firefox.profile has to be the firefox profile name, not the location or the folder name

Adjective

Answer 3

When running webdriver on a test server with no options to create profiles on the machine you can create your profile programmatically:

private FirefoxProfile GetFirefoxProfile()
{
    FirefoxProfile firefoxProfile = new FirefoxProfile();
    firefoxProfile.SetPreference("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "http://localhost");
    return firefoxProfile;
}

Pineapple

Answer 4

Fetching a profile is not useful as it is internally creating another copy of the fetched named profile. Accessing the original profile is required if for eg: test coverage data should be written to a data store across multiple invocations.

Here is a possible solution by Overriding the ProfilesIni class of Selenium

Start by creating a Custom profile using firefox -p, say "CustomSeleniumProfile"

ProfilesIni profileini = new ProfilesIni() {
    @Override
    public FirefoxProfile getProfile(String profileName) {
            File appData = locateAppDataDirectory(Platform.getCurrent());
            Map<String, File> profiles = readProfiles(appData);
            File profileDir = profiles.get(profileName);
            if (profileDir == null)
              return null;
            return new FirefoxProfile(profileDir);
     }
};
FirefoxProfile profile = profileini.getProfile("CustomSeleniumProfile");
//profile.setEnableNativeEvents(false);

driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);
//ffDriver.manage().deleteAllCookies();
driver.get("http://www.google.com");

Brittney

Wow, thanks. The existing ProfilesIni() quit working for some reason, and always returned an anonymous profile directory below /tmp. – Confucian