How to deal with certificates using Selenium?

Question

I am using Selenium to launch a browser. How can I deal with the webpages (URLs) that will ask the browser to accept a certificate or not?

In Firefox, I may have a website like that asks me to accept its certificate like this:

On the Internet Explorer browser, I may get something like this:

On Google Chrome:

I repeat my question: How can I automate the acceptance of a website's certificate when I launch a browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome) with Selenium (Python programming language)?

Solution 1

For the Firefox, you need to set accept_untrusted_certs FirefoxProfile() option to True:

from selenium import webdriver

profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.accept_untrusted_certs = True

driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)
driver.get('https://cacert.org/')

driver.close()

For Chrome, you need to add --ignore-certificate-errors ChromeOptions() argument:

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('ignore-certificate-errors')

driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)
driver.get('https://cacert.org/')

driver.close()

For the Internet Explorer, you need to set acceptSslCerts desired capability:

from selenium import webdriver

capabilities = webdriver.DesiredCapabilities().INTERNETEXPLORER
capabilities['acceptSslCerts'] = True

driver = webdriver.Ie(capabilities=capabilities)
driver.get('https://cacert.org/')

driver.close()

---

Actually, according to the Desired Capabilities documentation, setting acceptSslCerts capability to True should work for all browsers since it is a generic read/write capability:

acceptSslCerts

boolean

Whether the session should accept all SSL certs by default.

---

Working demo for Firefox:

>>> from selenium import webdriver

Setting acceptSslCerts to False:

>>> capabilities = webdriver.DesiredCapabilities().FIREFOX
>>> capabilities['acceptSslCerts'] = False
>>> driver = webdriver.Firefox(capabilities=capabilities)
>>> driver.get('https://cacert.org/')
>>> print(driver.title)
Untrusted Connection
>>> driver.close()

Setting acceptSslCerts to True:

>>> capabilities = webdriver.DesiredCapabilities().FIREFOX
>>> capabilities['acceptSslCerts'] = True
>>> driver = webdriver.Firefox(capabilities=capabilities)
>>> driver.get('https://cacert.org/')
>>> print(driver.title)
Welcome to CAcert.org
>>> driver.close()

Solution 2

For Firefox:

ProfilesIni profile = new ProfilesIni();
FirefoxProfile myprofile = profile.getProfile("default");
myprofile.setAcceptUntrustedCertificates(true);
myprofile.setAssumeUntrustedCertificateIssuer(true);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(myprofile);

For Chrome we can use:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
capabilities.setCapability("chrome.switches", Arrays.asList("--ignore-certificate-errors"));
driver = new ChromeDriver(capabilities);

For Internet Explorer we can use:

DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
capabilities.setCapability(CapabilityType.ACCEPT_SSL_CERTS, true);      
Webdriver driver = new InternetExplorerDriver(capabilities);

Solution 3

For people coming to this question related to headless chrome via python selenium, you may find https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=721739#c102 to be useful.

It looks like you can either do

chrome_options = Options()
chrome_options.add_argument('--allow-insecure-localhost')

or something along the lines of the following (may need to adapt for python):

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions()
DesiredCapabilities caps = DesiredCapabilities.chrome()
caps.setCapability(ChromeOptions.CAPABILITY, options)
caps.setCapability("acceptInsecureCerts", true)
WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(caps)

Solution 4

For Firefox Python:

The Firefox Self-signed certificate bug has now been fixed: accept ssl cert with marionette firefox webdrive python splinter

"acceptSslCerts" should be replaced by "acceptInsecureCerts"

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.desired_capabilities import DesiredCapabilities
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_binary import FirefoxBinary

caps = DesiredCapabilities.FIREFOX.copy()
caps['acceptInsecureCerts'] = True
ff_binary = FirefoxBinary("path to the Nightly binary")

driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=ff_binary, capabilities=caps)
driver.get("https://expired.badssl.com")

Solution 5

And in C# (.net core) using Selenium.Webdriver and Selenium.Chrome.Webdriver like this:

ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.AddArgument("--ignore-certificate-errors");
using (var driver = new ChromeDriver(Path.GetDirectoryName(Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly().Location),options))
{ 
  ...
}

View more solutions

Comments

[Admin]

But what about the code above done in Java ? It is asking each browser to accept the certificate of the current visted website. Can not we do the same in Python ?

[Admin]

what about Internet Explorer and Google Chrome ?

[estemendoza]

I'm not being able to make it work on IE 11, it just keeps showing me the Certificate Error page

[Alter Hu]

For firefox 48+ using geckodriver still have issue ,this's open issue in geckodriver ,they still have no idea for it ,see the Bug Issue

[user1]

The question was about Python. You could at least write what language is that.

[Rémi Debette]

And now Firefox 52 is live. Upgrade Firefox, upgrade selenium to v3.3, download geckodriver to v0.15 and you don't even need the binary path anymore!

[rtaft]

This answer is no longer valid, use 'acceptInsecureCerts' instead

[Diego F Medina]

This comment might be very late but helpful for people reaching the question now. I tried all of the above and nothing worked. Only managed to pass the Error with: driver.get("javascript:document.getElementById('overridelink‌​').click()")

[Happy Bird]

Be careful, 'ProfilesIni' is deprecated !

[Erkki Nokso-Koivisto]

for chromedriver I ended up passing all of these four strings to options.add_argument --> allow-running-insecure-content and ignore-certificate-errors and allow-insecure-localhost and unsafely-treat-insecure-origin-as-secure (you can try to find more by: strings /opt/google/chrome/chrome | grep insecure and similar grepping)

[David Buck]

While this code may solve the question, including an explanation of how and why this solves the problem would really help to improve the quality of your post, and probably result in more up-votes. Remember that you are answering the question for readers in the future, not just the person asking now. Please edit your answer to add explanations and give an indication of what limitations and assumptions apply.

[Abhishek Bhagate]

While this code snippet may solve the question, including an explanation really helps to improve the quality of your post. Remember that you are answering the question for readers in the future, and those people might not know the reasons for your code suggestion

[Roberto Petrilli]

Hope that java version may help ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions(); options .addArguments("--ignore-ssl-errors=yes", "--ignore-certificate-errors"); ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(options);