Clear Firefox cache in Selenium IDE - firefox

Question

I'm using Selenium IDE to test a web application. Sometimes my tests succeed even though they should have failed. The reason is that the browser happens to load a previous version of a page from the cache instead of loading the newer version of that page. In other words, I might introduce a bug to my app without being aware of it because the tests may pass after loading a previous working version instead of loading the new buggy version.
The best solution I could have thought of is to delete the browser cache before running the tests. I have a Selenium script in which I run set-up selenium commands before running the tests. Is there a selenium command to clear Firefox cache? Alternatively, is there another way to prevent loading pages from the cache during the tests?

Answer 1

In python this should disable firefox cache:
profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_preference("browser.cache.disk.enable", False)
profile.set_preference("browser.cache.memory.enable", False)
profile.set_preference("browser.cache.offline.enable", False)
profile.set_preference("network.http.use-cache", False)
driver = webdriver.Firefox(profile)
hope this helps someone

Answer 2

You can disable the cache in firefox profile.
See this link for more details.

Answer 3

For those programming in Java, here is how I solve the issue:
FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile();
profile.setPreference("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);
profile.setPreference("browser.cache.memory.enable", false);
profile.setPreference("browser.cache.offline.enable", false);
profile.setPreference("network.http.use-cache", false);
FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions().setProfile(profile);
driver = new FirefoxDriver(options);

Answer 4

Disclaimer: I've never had to do this before (clearing the cookies has always been sufficient for me), but from what I can see, this is functionality that is lacking in the current builds of Selenium, although from recent changelogs, it looks like the developers are making a push to make a standard way of doing this. In 2.33 of iedriverserver, They have the following changenote:
Introduced ability to clean browser cache before launching IE. This version
introduces the ie.ensureCleanSession capability, which will clear the
browser cache, history, and cookies before launching IE. When using this
capability, be aware that this clears the cache for all running instances of
Internet Explorer. Using this capability while attempting to run multiple
instances of the IE driver may cause unexpected behavior. Note this also
will cause a performance drop when launching the browser, as the driver will
wait for the cache clearing process to complete before actually launching
IE
http://selenium.googlecode.com/git/cpp/iedriverserver/CHANGELOG
To do this, you would specify this at driver creation time in the DesiredCapabilities Map using ensureCleanSession.
http://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/DesiredCapabilities
Since you're using firefox, it looks like you're out of luck in using a native way to do this. If you haven't tried driver.manage().deleteAllCookies();, I'd try that to see if it gets you where you need to be.

Answer 5

For C# and Geckodriver v0.31.0
public Task<WebDriver> newInstance()
{
return Task.Run(() =>
{
foreach (var process in Process.GetProcessesByName("geckodriver"))
{
process.Kill();
}
FirefoxProfileManager profilemanager = new FirefoxProfileManager();
System.Collections.ObjectModel.ReadOnlyCollection<String> profilesList = profilemanager.ExistingProfiles;
foreach (String profileFound in profilesList)
{
Console.WriteLine(profileFound);
}
FirefoxOptions options = new FirefoxOptions();
FirefoxProfile profile = profilemanager.GetProfile("default");
//profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.SetPreference("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);
profile.SetPreference("browser.cache.memory.enable", false);
profile.SetPreference("browser.cache.offline.enable", false);
profile.SetPreference("network.http.use-cache", false);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(options);
return driver;
});
}