townx

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.

1. Close down any running Firefox instances.
2. Start Firefox (the one you're going to run your tests with) with the profile manager: firefox -ProfileManager
3. 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.
4. Select the profile and run Firefox using it.
5. Browse to the HTTPS URL (with self-signed certificate) you're going to be testing against.
6. Accept the self-signed certificate when prompted. This creates an exception for it in the profile.
7. Close the browser.
8. Go to the Firefox profile directory.
9. Delete everything in the directory except for the cert_override.txt and cert8.db files.
10. 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.