Selenium + Firefox + HTTPS - firefox

Question

Okay. I know that I am asking a hackneyed, overchewed question but I am posting this because my problem is not getting solved despite trying all the solutions provided on various links.
My constraint - I don't want to use a saved firefox profile to save the website's certificate.
Selenium server version - 2.0b3
Solutions tried -
1) http://seleniumhq.org/docs/05_selenium_rc.html#handling-https-and-security-popups
Browser launcher *firefox
Selenium started with trustAllSSLCertificates option.
Did not help. FF again asks to save the certificate.
2) http://blog.mogotest.com/2010/04/13/how-to-accept-self-signed-ssl-certificates-in-selenium/
Browser launcher *firefoxproxy
Selenium started with trustAllSSLCertificates option.
Did not help.
3) Selenium Testing HTTPs Trust All certificates working for FF but not IE
4) Besides that I tried creating my own cert_override.txt and populating the 5 fields as explained in https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Cert_override.txt but getting the value for the 5th field which is the certificate's serial number and the issuer name as a base64 encoded string is not straightforward as explained in http://tinyurl.com/ce4vn99.
5) Using the Remember Certificate Exception addon for Firefox http://sejq.blogspot.in/2009/01/remember-certificate-exception.html is yet another option but I have not been able to do a full silent install of it. When we drop the xpi file in the required directory, the next time Firefox starts, it will prompt saying that should it found the addon and should it go ahead and install. The addon won't just get reflected in the browser. If anyone can atleast help me with a FULL silent install of this, it would be great!
All I want is that this works in Firefox. I am not interested in IE and Google Chrome.
Any help in providing an answer and not just terming this as a duplicate would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I would suggest an alternative to Selenium.
Have you tried Sahi? It's basically a very similar application, in that it allows scripted browser control, but for a lot of cases it seems to work better than Selenium.
From the Sahi FAQ page:
How does it compare to Selenium?
Sahi is easier to learn and use for testers. Sahi’s recorder works on all browsers. Sahi automatically waits for AJAX and page loads. It does not use XPaths, but uses more intuitive APIs like _in and _near. Sahi works well across frames, iframes, popup windows, sites with dynamic ids, https sites, 401 authentication sites etc. It has inbuilt HTML reports, and ability to run multiple scripts in parallel.
In my experience, this is accurate. There are certain types of browser event that Selenium struggles with, that Sahi handles much better.
I know that doesn't solve your problem with Selenium, and I know it's a pain if you've already written your tests in Selenium to re-do them in Sahi so it may not be the solution you're looking for, but if all else fails, it may be worth considering.
ps - you didn't mention anything about your development environment, but there is a PHP-based testing tool called Mink which integrates with both Sahi and Selenium -- ie you can write the a single test script and have it work in either. I don't know of any similar tool in other languages, but it might be of interest if it helps you migrate between the two.

Answer 2

So the solution turned out to be the 5th point mentioned above.
Here are the steps to solve the issue -
1) Download the Remember Certificate Exception xpi file from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/remember-certificate-exception/
2) Unzip it to get a set of files. Keep them in a temporary folder. (temp_folder/extracted_files)
3) Open the install.rdf file and copy the content of em:id node present in the Description node.
4) Rename the temporary folder just created with this copied string.
5) Place this folder under the profile_name/extensions/ directory. Also delete the extensions.cache/.ini/.rdf files from your profile folder. These need to be deleted so as to prevent the user from being prompted that his profile has been changed and that there is a new addon to be installed. Only if the 3 files are deleted, it will be a fully silent install.
This can be automated using a script.
#!/bin/bash
mkdir /tmp/addon
cp -r ~/POC/remember_certificate_exception-1.0.0-fx.xpi /tmp/addon
unzip /tmp/addon/remember_certificate_exception-1.0.0-fx.xpi -d /tmp/addon
rm /tmp/addon/remember_certificate_exception-1.0.0-fx.xpi
folder_name=$(cat /tmp/addon/install.rdf | grep -m 1 "<em:id>" | cut -f2 -d ">" | cut -f1 -d "<")
mv /tmp/addon /tmp/$folder_name
cp -r /tmp/$folder_name ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/extensions
rm -f ~/.mozilla/firefox/*.default/extensions.

Answer 3

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/skip-cert-error/
Use this addon. This will bypass the https errors. This is configurable as well

Answer 4

I've put together an example that shows how to use Selenium to test HTTPS endpoints -- without ignoring certificate validation errors. It shows how to setup the selenium clients with trusted root CAs that can be used to validate the server certificates presented by the HTTPS endpoints being tested. See https://github.com/JeNeSuisPasDave/Selenium-and-TLS
The example demonstrates Chrome and Firefox Selenium nodes. Chrome looks in the system trusted certificate store for root CA certs used for validation; Firefox looks in the cert8.db file within the current profile.
I think this approach is important because I think that instructing your test harness to ignore certificate errors is unnecessarily risky; doing so may eventually hide errors that you wish you had trapped before they got deployed to production.
I wrote an short post about this topic, https://develves.net/blogs/asd/2017-02-20-selenium-and-tls/, but you really just need the example repo linked above.