Selenium2 firefox: use the default profile

Question

Selenium2, by default, starts firefox with a fresh profile. I like that for a default, but for some good reasons (access to my bookmarks, saved passwords, use my add-ons, etc.) I want to start with my default profile.

There is supposed to be a property controlling this but I think the docs are out of sync with the source, because as far as I can tell webdriver.firefox.bin is the only one that works. E.g. starting selenium with:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin=not-there

works (i.e. it complains). But this has no effect:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.profile=default

("default" is the name in profiles.ini, but I've also tried with "Profile0" which is the name of the section in profiles.ini).

I'm using PHPWebdriver (which uses JsonWireProtocol) to access:

$webdriver = new WebDriver("localhost", "4444");

$webdriver->connect("firefox");

I tried doing it from the PHP side:

$webdriver->connect("firefox","",array('profile'=>'default') );

or:

$webdriver->connect("firefox","",array('profile'=>'Profile0') );

with no success (firefox starts, but not using my profile).

I also tried the hacker's approach of creating a batch file:

#!/bin/bash
/usr/bin/firefox -P default

And then starting Selenium with: java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.bin="/usr/local/src/selenium/myfirefox"

Firefox starts, but not using by default profile and, worse, everything hangs: selenium does not seem able to communicate with firefox when started this way.

P.S. I saw Selenium - Custom Firefox profile I tried this:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate "not-there"

And it refuses to run! Excited, thinking I might be on to something, I tried:

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.5.0.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate /path/to/0abczyxw.default/

This does nothing. I.e. it still starts with a new profile :-(

Solution 1

Simon Stewart answered this on the mailing list for me.

To summarize his reply: you take your firefox profile, zip it up (zip, not tgz), base64-encode it, then send the whole thing as a /session json request (put the base64 string in the firefox_profile key of the Capabilities object).

An example way to do this on Linux:

cd /your/profile
zip -r profile *
base64 profile.zip > profile.zip.b64

And then if you're using PHPWebDriver when connecting do:

$webdriver->connect("firefox", "", array("firefox_profile" => file_get_contents("/your/profile/profile.zip.b64")))

NOTE: It still won't be my real profile, rather a copy of it. So bookmarks won't be remembered, the cache won't be filled, etc.

Solution 2

Here is the Java equivalent. I am sure there is something similar available in php.

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

If you want to additonal extensions you can do something like this as well.

ProfilesIni profile = new ProfilesIni();
FirefoxProfile ffprofile = profile.getProfile("default");
ffprofile.addExtension(new File("path/to/my/firebug.xpi"));
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(ffprofile);

Solution 3

java -jar selenium-server-standalone-2.21.0.jar -Dwebdriver.firefox.profile=default

should work. the bug is fixed.

Just update your selenium-server.

Solution 4

I was curious about this as well and what I got to work was very simple. I use the command /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox-bin -P to bring up Profile Manager. After I found which profile I needed to use I used the following code to activate the profile browser = Selenium::WebDriver.for :firefox, :profile => "batman".

This pulled all of my bookmarks and plug-ins that were associated with that profile.

Hope this helps.

Solution 5

From my understanding, it is not possible to use the -Dwebdriver.firefox.profile=<name> command line parameter since it will not be taken into account in your use case because of the current code design. Since I faced the same issue and did not want to upload a profile directory every time a new session is created, I've implemented this patch that introduces a new firefox_profile_name parameter that can be used in the JSON capabilities to target a specific Firefox profile on the remote server. Hope this helps.

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Comments

[Darren Cook]

Thanks @nilesh. Am I correct in thinking this is using WebDriver directly; you are not starting selenium-server-standalone.jar and therefore not using JsonWireProtocol?

[nilesh]

This is using webdriver directly. I am not sure what you mean by starting with stand alone jar. WebDriver itself uses JsonWireProtocol to communicate code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/JsonWireProtocol

[Darren Cook]

Ah, interesting. So your above java snippet somehow gets turned into JSON and web service calls? If I could just track down what those calls are then I could implement it in the PHP library. But whatever it is doing is not documented at the URL you gave, and I've not see any other docs for the JsonWireProtocol. I think I'll contact the Selenium developers.

[Curtis Miller]

@Darren: the language is in ruby. But I am sure there is an equivalent for PHP.

[Darren Cook]

Great @Stéphane - if I've understood your patch, that is exactly what I was after. I've not tested it yet, but is it safe? (i.e. in its tidyup stage selenium deletes the temporary profile directory it creates; don't you need explicit code to stop that happening?)

[David]

Thanks, that was really helpful. Would be nice if the PHP code to zip the profile and then encode to base64 was provided so one could do everything in PHP.

[anonymous-one]

Reconfirming what has already been stated... This is the way to go. Worked flawless for us when we wanted to pipe all selenium requests thru a proxy.

[Darren Cook]

Great, thanks Muhammad. I just confirmed that does now work. (BTW, it is still a copy of the profile; i.e. cache/history are not filled in.)

[Muhammad Umer Farooq]

oh, I just use to save ssl certificates and some properties like dom.max_script_run_time.

[Stéphane]

Yes, it is safe. Selenium will in fact make a temporary copy of this profile and use it (like a template).