Selenium2 firefox: use the default profile - php

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 :-(

Answer 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.

Answer 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);

Answer 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.

Answer 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.

Answer 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.

Answer 6

I did It in Zend like this:
public function indexAction(){
$appdata = 'C:\Users\randomname\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox' . "\\";
$temp = 'C:\Temp\\';
$hash = md5(rand(0, 999999999999999999));
if(!isset($this->params['p'])){
shell_exec("\"C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Mozilla Firefox\\firefox.exe\" -CreateProfile " . $hash);
}else{
$hash = $this->params['p'];
}
$ini = new Zend_Config_Ini('C:\Users\randomname\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\profiles.ini');
$path = false;
foreach ($ini as $key => $value){
if(isset($value->Name) && $value->Name == $hash){
$path = $value->Path;
break;
}
}
if($path === false){
die('<pre>No profile found with name: ' . $hash);
}
echo "<pre>Profile : $hash \nProfile Path : " . $appdata . "$path \n";
echo "Files: \n";
$filesAndDirs = $this->getAllFiles($appdata . $path);
$files = $filesAndDirs[0];
foreach ($files as $file){
echo " $file\n";
}
echo "Dirs : \n";
$dirs = array_reverse($filesAndDirs[1]);
foreach ($dirs as $dir){
echo " $dir\n";
}
echo 'Zipping : ';
$zip = new ZipArchive();
$zipPath = md5($path) . ".temp.zip";
$zipRet = $zip->open($temp .$zipPath, ZipArchive::CREATE);
echo ($zipRet === true)?"Succes\n":"Error $zipRet\n";
echo "Zip name : $zipPath\n";
foreach ($dirs as $dir){
$zipRet = $zip->addEmptyDir($dir);
if(!($zipRet === true) ){
echo "Error creating folder: $dir\n";
}
}
foreach ($files as $file){
$zipRet = $zip->addFile($appdata . $path ."\\". $file,$file);
if(!($zipRet === true && file_exists($appdata . $path . "\\". $file) && is_readable($appdata . $path . "\\". $file))){
echo "Error zipping file: $appdata$path/$file\n";
}
}
$zipRet = $zip->addFile($appdata . $path ."\\prefs.js",'user.js');
if(!($zipRet === true && file_exists($appdata . $path . "\\". $file) && is_readable($appdata . $path . "\\". $file))){
echo "Error zipping file: $appdata$path/$file\n";
}
$zipRet = $zip->close();
echo "Closing zip : " . (($zipRet === true)?("Succes\n"):("Error:\n"));
if($zipRet !== true){
var_dump($zipRet);
}
echo "Reading zip in string\n";
$zipString = file_get_contents($temp .$zipPath);
echo "Encoding zip\n";
$zipString = base64_encode($zipString);
echo $zipString . "\n";
require 'webdriver.php';
echo "Connecting Selenium\n";
$webDriver = new WebDriver("localhost",'4444');
if(!$webDriver->connect("firefox","",array('firefox_profile'=>$zipString))
{
die('Selenium is not running');
}
}
private function getAllFiles($path,$WithPath = false){
$return = array();
$dirs = array();
if (is_dir($path)) {
if ($dh = opendir($path)) {
while (($file = readdir($dh)) !== false) {
if(!in_array($file, array('.','..'))){
if(is_dir($path . "\\" . $file)){
$returned = $this->getAllFiles($path . "\\" . $file,(($WithPath==false)?'':$WithPath) . $file . "\\");
$return = array_merge($return,$returned[0]);
$dirs = array_merge($dirs,$returned[1]);
$dirs[] = (($WithPath==false)?'':$WithPath) . $file;
}else{
$return[] = (($WithPath==false)?'':$WithPath) . $file;
}
}
}
closedir($dh);
}
}
return array($return,$dirs);
}
The Idea is that you give in the get/post/zend parameters P with the name of the profile if not a random wil be created, and he will zip all the files put it in the temp folder and put it in.