Selenium and self-signed SSL Certificates(https)

For quite some time , i have postponed this task of running my product in https mode and add this part in the selenium framework we have designed.

The following is my learning in this part . Though half baked (yet of find an answer for this in IE) , it might be useful for someone .

Basic of selenium RC , ie starting a new firefox profile everytime and so we will be loosing the https added certificates which we have stored by default . The best workaround is to create a new custom firefox profile , add the exception to it . And use this firefox profile to start the selenium session.

Following blog posts would be well suffice to do get it work on this workaround

http://jktechtrip.wordpress.com/2011/04/14/selenium-and-self-signed-ssl-certificates-in-firefox-java-linux/

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 and go to the Firefox profile directory.

Copy the files cert_override.txt and cert8.db files in the new firefox custom profile directory


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. Ie java -jar selenium-server.jar -firefoxProfileTemplate “”

You can check for the newly created firefox profile at

C:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\hpgmv92o.testprofile (This will change based on the location u create ur profile)

Info : cert_override.txt is a text file generated in the user profile to store certificate exceptions specified by the user. This file is used by Firefox, Thunderbird, and other XUL-based applications.

Why is that trustAllSSLCertificates flag can't be used . Yup the following blogpost tells you in detail how to use that

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

For a long time , i was searching for a answer to find a way how to start selenium in IE in https mode . But still not have found a way . Comment and say if you have an answer for this