Firefox Build does not work with Selenium

Question

for my research, I did some source code modifications in firefox and build it myself. In order to automate testing, I opted to use Selenium but unfortunately, my newly built

Answer 1

I have spent a long time debugging this and ultimately gave up trying to make incompatible versions of selenium/firefox work. I just don't have the expertise in firefox to go any further. My recommendation is downloading stable versions from https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/ and keep trying combinations of firefox/selenium that work for your environment. For me, this is:

firefox==32.0.3 selenium==2.43.0

I'm referring to the changelog here: http://selenium.googlecode.com/git/java/CHANGELOG to see which versions are supposedly compatible.

Basically, what is happening is webdriver is polling on its port until it can establish a socket connection.

def _wait_until_connectable(self):
    """Blocks until the extension is connectable in the firefox."""
    count = 0
    while not utils.is_connectable(self.profile.port):
        if self.process.poll() is not None:
            # Browser has exited
            raise WebDriverException("The browser appears to have exited "
                  "before we could connect. If you specified a log_file in "
                  "the FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details.")
        if count == 30:
            self.kill()
            raise WebDriverException("Can't load the profile. Profile "
                  "Dir: %s If you specified a log_file in the "
                  "FirefoxBinary constructor, check it for details.")
        count += 1
        time.sleep(1)
    return True

And then if there is an socket error, keep going. So what you are probably seeing (at least what I am) is the browser hanging for 30 secs.

def is_connectable(port):
    """
    Tries to connect to the server at port to see if it is running.

    :Args:
     - port: The port to connect.
    """
    try:
        socket_ = socket.socket(socket.AF_INET, socket.SOCK_STREAM)
        socket_.settimeout(1)
        socket_.connect(("127.0.0.1", port))
        socket_.close()
        return True
    except socket.error:
        return False

Bleh. Alright, well I finally just decided to store the specific version I want and switch to the compatible selenium version.

bin_dir = os.path.join(const.WEBDRIVER_DIR, 'firefox', 'binary', '32.0.3', 'linux-x86_64', 'firefox')
binary = FirefoxBinary(firefox_path=bin_dir)
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)

I also highly recommend adding a log file to the firefox binary and checking that. Your issue might be unique and any bizarre errors will be logged there:

log_dir = os.path.join(const.LOGS_DIR, 'firefox')
    try:
    os.makedirs(directory)
except OSError, e:
    if e.errno == errno.EEXIST and os.path.isdir(directory):
        pass
log_path = os.path.join(log_dir, '{}.log'.format(datetime.datetime.now().isoformat('_'))
log_file = open(log_path, 'w')
binary = FirefoxBinary(firefox_path=bin_dir, log_file=log_file)