Can I run Selenium ChromeDriver with cookies from actual Chrome installation?

Question

So I'm running a selenium test using IntelliJ IDEA + chromedriver on an Ubuntu machine...

In my Google Chrome installation, I have logged in to an account, say Google. When I access http://accounts.google.com in the selenium test, I get to the log in page instead of the actual account management page.

I'm pretty sure that I don't fully understand the exact way that Selenium and the chrome driver operate, but I do remember that having 'Google Chrome installed in the default location' is one of the requirements of running a Selenium test with the chrome driver.

Can I run in the context of my installed browser i.e. have access to my browser history and cookies?

Solution 1

Everytime Selenium opens a browser (Chrome/Firefox/IE) it opens a canonical form of that browser. As a tester, you can set browser preferences using DesiredCapabilities object and for chrome you also can use ChromeOptions object, for passing chrome command line arguments.

To choose your profile

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("user-data-dir=/path/to/your/custom/profile");

For more on chrome driver capabilities: https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/capabilities

For more about user-data-dir command line option for chrome:
https://www.chromium.org/user-experience/user-data-directory

Solution 2

Try this:

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions() 
options.add_argument("user-data-dir=C:\\Path") #Path to your chrome profile
w = webdriver.Chrome(executable_path="C:\\Users\\chromedriver.exe", chrome_options=options)

To find path to your chrome profile data you need to type chrome://version/ into address bar . For ex. mine is displayed as C:\Users\pc\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default, to use it in the script I had to exclude \Default\ so we end up with only C:\Users\pc\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data.

Source:How to load default profile in chrome using Python Selenium Webdriver?

Comments

[Satisfakshin]

Thanks for the help parishodak! This answers my question.

[parishodak]

glad to be of help @satisfakshin. I am not sure why you need your profile to work. this will affect the test cases running on another user's machine.

[Satisfakshin]

Actually just making a proof of concept for something