townx - Dealing with self-signed SSL certificates when running Selenium server with Firefox - Comments

Nice

Guest — Wed, 25 May 2011 01:32:25 -0500

Thanks a lot. It really worked for me. Very nice job.

Hi All, If you are still

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 05:20:25 -0500

Hi All,

If you are still having problems with self-signed SSL certificates in FF, check out my solution.

http://jktechtrip.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/selenium-and-self-signed-ssl-...

Hope this work also for you :)

Regards,
J

even simpler solution...

Guest — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 22:41:03 -0600

Just use a (reverse) proxy. You may use Apache for that purpose. Selenium connects via http://your.site to the proxy and the proxy connects to https://your.site.

Set up the reverse proxy on your localhost and put "127.0.0.1 your.site" into /etc/hosts and tell the reverse proxy to use the true IP instead of "your.site".

Should work in most cases...

Kevin, thanks, I'll take a

elliot — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 17:28:47 -0500

Kevin, thanks, I'll take a look next time I come across this issue.

Alternative approach

Kevin Menard — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 20:24:15 -0500

Hi Elliot,

I came up with another way to do this. It's probably not any simpler, but it will handle all SSL certificates, so you won't constantly have to create new Firefox profiles. The article is at:

http://mogotest.com/blog/2010/04/13/how-to-accept-self-signed-ssl-certif...

--
Kevin

This really worked for me..

Rahul — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 08:09:42 -0500

This really worked for me.. Thanks a lot!!!!!!!!!!

This article really helped

Guest — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 03:25:01 -0600

This article really helped me a lot.
I was tired of this problem for many days.
Thanks a lot!

Sorry, not really sure about

elliot — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 18:12:06 -0600

Sorry, not really sure about IE :)

Thanks!!!

Guest — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:43:10 -0500

Finally it's working! :)
But could you tell me a similar trick for IE (IE6)? Still have to accept the certificates by hand while using Selenium RC.

You're welcome.

elliot — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:32:55 -0500

You're welcome.

You're more than welcome. It

elliot — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 15:31:33 -0500

You're more than welcome. It was very annoying for me, too, while it was broken.

Elliot. Thanks for the post.

Guest — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 12:31:47 -0500

Elliot. Thanks for the post. Its working great for me.
Thanks you so mucccccch!

Thanks a lot for this

Guest — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 09:54:55 -0500

Thanks a lot for this

Worked great for me - thanks.

Guest — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 14:13:40 -0500

Worked great for me - thanks.

I am using LoggingSelenium,

Sss — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:36:26 -0500

I am using LoggingSelenium, becuase it generates nice html reports, but your approach doesnt seem to work here. Any thoughts ? I am still struggling get rid of certificate exceptions. Thanks in advance.

protected LoggingSelenium mySelenium;
LoggingCommandProcessor myProcessor = new LoggingCommandProcessor(new HttpCommandProcessor(SELENIUM_SERVER, SELENIUM_PORT, BROWSER_TYPE,BASE_URL), htmlFormatter);
myProcessor.setExcludedCommands(new String[] {});
mySelenium = new LoggingDefaultSelenium(myProcessor);
mySelenium.start();

Dealing with self-signed SSL certificates when running Selenium server with Firefox

elliot — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 12:58:34 -0600

Selenium is a decent tool for testing web UIs, with good integration with a variety of languages. We use it on Talis Prism for testing the UI, running a Selenium server instance then firing Ruby rspec tests and an older HTML suite at it. Here's the part of the Ant build script which runs the HTML suite using Selenium :

<target name="prism-selenium-tests" description="Run the old Prism Selenium tests">
  <echo message="Running old Selenium tests against Prism" />
  <java jar="test/dependencies/Selenium/selenium-server.jar" fork="true" maxmemory="1024m">
    <arg line="-debug -timeout 500 -htmlSuite '*chrome ${firefox.bin}' http://${prism.host} \
       test/selenium/testSuite.html doc/seleniumResults.html" />
  </java>
</target>

where the variables we interpose are:

${firefox.bin} = path to the Firefox binary to use
${prism.host} = HTTP host to run the tests against

This works without a hitch if you're not using HTTPS; but as soon as your tests redirect to an HTTPS URL on the same host (we serve parts of Prism over SSL), where your SSL certificate is self-signed, things go wrong. As Selenium effectively runs Firefox with a new profile every time, you potentially lose any certificate exceptions you might accept.

One technique we were using was to create a custom profile; run Firefox using that profile; browse to the HTTPS URL and accept the exception into that profile; then close the profile.

This kind of worked, but we still got odd popups from Firefox about new extensions being installed. Just annoying.

I think I've now worked out the solution, which was largely based on http://kapanka.com/2008/12/selenium-rc-firefox-and-the-self-signed-ssl-c.... It's a bit of a pain in the arse, but it does seem to work. Here goes.

Close down any running Firefox instances.
Start Firefox (the one you're going to run your tests with) with the profile manager: firefox -ProfileManager
Create a new profile. You'll be prompted to choose a directory for the profile. Put it somewhere inside the project where you're writing the tests.
Select the profile and run Firefox using it.
Browse to the HTTPS URL (with self-signed certificate) you're going to be testing against.
Accept the self-signed certificate when prompted. This creates an exception for it in the profile.
Close the browser.
Go to the Firefox profile directory.
Delete everything in the directory except for the cert_override.txt and cert8.db files.
When you run your Selenium server (like in my Ant example above), pass a -firefoxProfileTemplate /path/to/profile/dir argument to it. This tells Selenium to use your partial profile (with certificate exceptions) as a basis for minting its new profile. So you get the certificate exceptions, but without any of the other clutter you would get if you used a whole profile.

The Ant task above, with this option, looks like this:

<target name="prism-selenium-tests" description="Run the old Prism Selenium tests">
  <echo message="Running old Selenium tests against Prism" />
  <java jar="test/dependencies/Selenium/selenium-server.jar" fork="true" maxmemory="1024m">
    <arg line="-debug -timeout 500 -firefoxProfileTemplate test/firefoxProfile \
       -htmlSuite '*chrome ${firefox.bin}' http://${prism.host} test/selenium/testSuite.html doc/seleniumResults.html" />
  </java>
</target>

Outside of Ant, the command might look something like:

java -jar test/dependencies/Selenium/selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate /path/to/profile \
-htmlSuite '*chrome firefox-bin' http://host.com testSuite.html seleniumResults.html

Works for me.