How to stop Selenium from creating temporary Firefox Profiles using Web Driver?

java selenium firefox webdriver profile
Ranhiru Jude Cooray picture Ranhiru Jude Cooray · Jul 22, 2011 · Viewed 53.5k times · Source

I am using Selenium Web Driver API with Java. Every time I want to debug my test cases, a temporary profile for Firefox is created in the temporary files directory. This is a headache in two ways.

  1. It definitely is taking unnecessary time to create a profile and is taking unnecessary space.
  2. I cannot install any addons that will be available next time I launch my test cases.

How do I get around this?

Answer

Ross Patterson picture Ross Patterson · Jul 26, 2011

You can control how the Firefox driver chooses the profile. Set the webdriver.firefox.profile property to the name of the profile you want to use. Most folks think this is a bad idea, because you'll inherit all the cookies, cache contents, etc. of the previous uses of the profile, but it's allowed if you really want to do it.

For example:

System.setProperty("webdriver.firefox.profile", "MySeleniumProfile");
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(...);

UPDATE - From Ranhiru

How I handled it for Java

FirefoxProfile profile = new FirefoxProfile(new File("D:\\Selenium Profile"));                  
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

Then I changed settings in Firefox to clear all cookies and cache when exiting. Look here on how to do it.

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