How to stop Selenium from creating temporary Firefox Profiles using Web Driver?

Question

I am using Selenium Web Driver API with Java. Every time I want to debug my test cases, a temporary profile for Firefox is created in the temporary files directory. This is a headache in two ways.

1. It definitely is taking unnecessary time to create a profile and is taking unnecessary space.
2. I cannot install any addons that will be available next time I launch my test cases.

How do I get around this?

Solution 1

You can control how the Firefox driver chooses the profile. Set the webdriver.firefox.profile property to the name of the profile you want to use. Most folks think this is a bad idea, because you'll inherit all the cookies, cache contents, etc. of the previous uses of the profile, but it's allowed if you really want to do it.

For example:

System.setProperty("webdriver.firefox.profile", "MySeleniumProfile");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(...);

UPDATE - From Ranhiru

How I handled it for Java

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile(new File("D:\\Selenium Profile"));                  
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Then I changed settings in Firefox to clear all cookies and cache when exiting. Look here on how to do it.

Solution 2

Be sure you call

driver.quit();

instead of

driver.close();

close() will not delete temporary files

Solution 3

The answer was actually pretty easy after I went through this question where I found the documentation. I found the FirefoxProfile class and the constructor took the path to the Firefox Profile.

WebDriver driver = null;
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile(new File("C:\\Users\\Ranhiru\\AppData\\Roaming\\Mozilla\\Firefox\\Profiles\\qp1nizdo.Selenium"));
driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

I created a new profile by running "Firefox.exe" with the -p flag.

Firefox.exe -p

Installed the extensions I needed to this profile and I was good to go! :)

Update

It does not matter whether you assign a profile or not, the temporary profile in the temp folder is created nevertheless. By creating and assigning a profile you get the chance to use firebug/xpather/your favorite extension when testing.

Solution 4

You can load the FirefoxWebDriver with the desired plugins by calling addExtension(File) method in FirefoxProfile class.

Example:

try {
    File firebug = new File("C:\\FFPlugins\\firebug-1.7.3.xpi");
    File xpathChecker = new File("C:\\FFPlugins\\xpath_checker-0.4.4-fx.xpi");
    profile.addExtension(firebug);
    profile.setPreference("extensions.firebug.currentVersion", "1.7.3");
    profile.addExtension(xpathChecker);
    profile.setPreference("extensions.xpath_checker.currentVersion", "0.4.4");
} catch(IOException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}
driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Solution 5

I have create a custom profile by running the command:

firefox -profileManager 

(then adding any exceptions etc I require - as due to selenium opening clean profile/instance each time the exceptions are lost)

I was then directly creating my Firefox with this profile using the following:

private static String profilePath = "C:\\fitnesse\\Selenesse\\FFProfiles";
private static FirefoxProfile ffprofile = new FirefoxProfile(profilePath); 
private static IWebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(ffprofile);

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