Starting Selenium with custom Firefox profile from Eclipse

Question

I'm running Selenium tests from within Eclipse, but I can't load a custom Firefox profile.

Most sources suggest I need to launch the Selenium Server like this:

java -jar selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate </path/to/template/>

But when launching my test from within Eclipse it doesn't use that - the tests will run if the Selenium Server isn't running.

This thread suggests that I can set the profile in the DefaultSelenium constructor:

Selenium RC - disabling browser cookie

But the code generated for me by Selenium IDE (Firefox plugin) doesn't use that constructor:

package com.example.tests;

import com.thoughtworks.selenium.*;
import java.util.regex.Pattern;

public class Example extends SeleneseTestCase {
    public void setUp() throws Exception {
        setUp("http://www.example.com/", "*firefox");
    }
    public void testExample() throws Exception {
        selenium.open("/");
        selenium.click("//body");
    }
}

Where should I set the DefaultSelenium configuration options? Or is there some other method I can use to load my custom Firefox template?

Thanks! Stu

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 05 '11 at 03:32

I made a SeleniumTestCase that starts/stops the server before/after each test class and starts/stops the Selenium instance before/after each test:

public class SeleniumTestCase {
    protected static Selenium selenium;
    protected static AppNavUtils appNavUtils;

    @BeforeClass
    public static void setUpBeforeClass() throws Exception {
        SeleniumServerControl.getInstance().startSeleniumServer();
    }

    @AfterClass
    public static void tearDownAfterClass() throws Exception {
        SeleniumServerControl.getInstance().stopSeleniumServer();
    }

    @Before
    public void setUp() throws Exception {
        // Replace "*chrome" with "*firefox" for Selenium > 1.0
        selenium = new DefaultSelenium("localhost", 5444, "*chrome", "http://localhost:8080/"); 
        selenium.start();
        appNavUtils = new AppNavUtils(selenium);
    }

    @After
    public void tearDown() throws Exception {
        selenium.stop();
    }  
}

The SeleniumServerControl starts and stops the server:

public class SeleniumServerControl {
    private static final SeleniumServerControl instance = new SeleniumServerControl();

    public static SeleniumServerControl getInstance()
    {
        return instance;
    }

    private SeleniumServer server = null;

    protected SeleniumServerControl(){}

    public void startSeleniumServer() {
        if (server == null) {
            RemoteControlConfiguration rcc = new RemoteControlConfiguration();
            rcc.setPort(5444);
            //rcc.setFirefoxProfileTemplate(newFirefoxProfileTemplate)
            server = new SeleniumServer(rcc);
        }

        server.start();
    }

    public void stopSeleniumServer()
    {
        if (server != null) {
            server.stop();
            server = null;
        }
    }
}

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 26 '10 at 21:59

the version of code you have above assumes that you are running your tests against localhost on port 4444 thats why it is has 2 parameters in the setup.

To set up eclipse to run it you will need to update the run configuration. That is under

Run > Run Configurations

Have a look for the item that has selenium in it and add the config above so that when it runs it will pick it up and run.

I personally just fire up the server when I start working by running a batch file and kill it at the end of the day.

You can also instantiate and start an instance of org.openqa.selenium.server.SeleniumServer if you want to do it all within the code. See .setFirefoxProfileTemplate(). — dhackner, Aug 03 '10 at 06:56

Starting Selenium with custom Firefox profile from Eclipse

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