The Perl Toolchain Summit needs more sponsors. If your company depends on Perl, please support this very important event.

NAME

Selenium::Firefox - Use FirefoxDriver without a Selenium server

VERSION

version 1.20

SYNOPSIS

    # These two are the same, and will only work with Firefox 48+
    my $driver = Selenium::Firefox->new;
    my $driver = Selenium::Firefox->new( marionette_enabled => 1 );
    ...
    $driver->shutdown_binary;

    # For Firefox 47 and older, disable marionette:
    my $driver = Selenium::Firefox->new( marionette_enabled => 0 );
    $driver->shutdown_binary;

DESCRIPTION

Breaking Changes: There are breaking changes in v1.0+ of this module if you're using it to start FF47; please see "BREAKING CHANGES". You can ignore this if you're using v1.0+ of this module to start FF48.

This class allows you to use the FirefoxDriver without needing the JRE or a selenium server running. Unlike starting up an instance of S::R::D, do not pass the remote_server_addr and port arguments, and we will search for the Firefox executable in your $PATH. We'll try to start the binary, connect to it, and shut it down at the end of the test.

If the Firefox application is not found in the expected places, we'll fall back to the default Selenium::Remote::Driver behavior of assuming defaults of 127.0.0.1:4444 after waiting a few seconds.

If you specify a remote server address, or a port, our assumption is that you are doing standard S::R::D behavior and we will not attempt any binary startup.

If you're curious whether your Selenium::Firefox instance is using a separate Firefox binary, or through the selenium server, you can check the value of the binary_mode attr after instantiation.

ATTRIBUTES

binary

Optional: specify the path to the geckodriver binary - this is NOT the path to the Firefox browser. To specify the path to your Firefox browser binary, see the "firefox_binary" attr.

For Firefox 48 and greater, this is the path to your geckodriver executable. If you don't specify anything, we'll search for geckodriver in your $PATH.

For Firefox 47 and older, this attribute does not apply, because the older FF browsers do not use the separate driver binary startup.

binary_port

Optional: specify the port that we should bind to. If you don't specify anything, we'll default to the driver's default port. Since there's no a priori guarantee that this will be an open port, this is _not_ necessarily the port that we end up using - if the port here is already bound, we'll search above it until we find an open one.

See "port" in Selenium::CanStartBinary for more details, and "port" in Selenium::Remote::Driver after instantiation to see what the actual port turned out to be.

firefox_profile

Optional: Pass in an instance of Selenium::Firefox::Profile pre-configured as you please. The preferences you specify will be merged with the ones necessary for setting up webdriver, and as a result some options may be overwritten or ignored.

    my $profile = Selenium::Firefox::Profile->new;
    my $firefox = Selenium::Firefox->new(
        firefox_profile => $profile
    );

marionette_binary_port

Optional: specify the port that we should bind marionette to. If you don't specify anything, we'll default to the marionette's default port. Since there's no a priori guarantee that this will be an open port, this is _not_ necessarily the port that we end up using - if the port here is already bound, we'll search above it until we find an open one.

    Selenium::Firefox->new(
        marionette_enabled     => 1,
        marionette_binary_port => 12345,
    );

Attempting to specify a marionette_binary_port in conjunction with setting marionette_enabled does not make sense and will most likely not do anything useful.

marionette_enabled

Optional: specify whether marionette should be enabled or not. By default, marionette is enabled, which assumes you are running with Firefox 48 or newer. To use this module to start Firefox 47 or older, you must pass <<marionette_enabled = 0>>>.

    my $ff48 = Selenium::Firefox->new( marionette_enabled => 1 ); # defaults to 1
    my $ff47 = Selenium::Firefox->new( marionette_enabled => 0 );

firefox_binary

Optional: specify the path to the Firefox browser executable. Although we will attempt to locate this in your $PATH, you may specify it explicitly here. Note that path here must point to a file that exists and is executable, or we will croak.

For Firefox 48 and newer, this will be passed to geckodriver such that it will attempt to start up the Firefox at the specified path. If you do not specify anything, we will look for the Firefox browser on our own in the normal places, but if the browser cannot be found, we'll probably die during instantiation.

For Firefox 47 and older, this browser path should be the file that we directly start up.

custom_args

Optional: specify any additional command line arguments you'd like invoked during the binary startup. See "custom_args" in Selenium::CanStartBinary for more information.

For Firefox 48 and newer, these arguments will be passed to geckodriver during start up.

For Firefox 47 and older, these arguments will be passed to the Firefox browser during start up.

startup_timeout

Optional: specify how long to wait for the binary to start itself and listen on its port. The default duration is arbitrarily 10 seconds. It accepts an integer number of seconds to wait: the following will wait up to 20 seconds:

    Selenium::Firefox->new( startup_timeout => 20 );

See "startup_timeout" in Selenium::CanStartBinary for more information.

fixed_ports

Optional: Throw instead of searching for additional ports; see "fixed_ports" in Selenium::CanStartBinary for more info.

METHODS

shutdown_binary

Call this method instead of "quit" in Selenium::Remote::Driver to ensure that the binary executable is also closed, instead of simply closing the browser itself. If the browser is still around, it will call quit for you. After that, it will try to shutdown the browser binary by making a GET to /shutdown and on Windows, it will attempt to do a taskkill on the binary CMD window.

    $self->shutdown_binary;

It doesn't take any arguments, and it doesn't return anything.

We do our best to call this when the $driver option goes out of scope, but if that happens during global destruction, there's nothing we can do.

BREAKING CHANGES

In version v1.0+ and newer, the default behavior is to enable marionette & geckodriver mode. This means that an existing script that works with v0.2701 and Firefox v47 will require modification if you upgrade Selenium::Firefox to v1.0+. That is,

    # v0.2701 of Selenium::Firefox works with FF47 like such; this will not
    # work for FF47 after upgrade:
    my $fx47_old = Selenium::Firefox->new;
    ...
    $fx47_old->shutdown_binary;

    # v1.0 of Selenium::Firefox works with FF47 like this
    my $fx47_new = Selenium::Firefox->new( marionette_enabled => 0);
    ...
    $fx47_new->shutdown_binary;

We default to assuming FF48 and geckodriver mode because all forthcoming versions of the Firefox browser will be using the geckodriver architecture, and also because that's consistent with the rest of the driver setups, which all have separate driver binaries apart from the browser itself. This means that:

    # v0.2701 of Selenium::Firefox cannot start up FF48 at all

    # v1.0+ of Selenium::Firefox works with FF48+ like this:
    my $fx48 = Selenium::Firefox->new;

As with the other drivers, Selenium::Firefox in marionette/geckodriver mode requires a geckodriver executable in the path or provided during startup, and it will also attempt to find the path to your Firefox browser. During testing, we found that it was necessary for us to pass the Firefox browser file path to the geckodriver executable during start up, or else geckodriver would have trouble finding Firefox.

get_context

 Description:
    Firefox extension: Retrieve browser's scope (chrome or content).
    Chrome is a privileged scope where you can access things like the
    Firefox UI itself. Content scope is where things like webpages live.

 Output:
    STRING - context {CHROME|CONTENT}

 Usage:
    print $firefox_driver->get_context();

set_context

 Description:
    Firefox extension: Set browser's scope (chrome or content).
    Chrome is a privileged scope where you can access things like the
    Firefox UI itself. Content scope is where things like webpages live.

 Input:
    Required:
        <STRING> - context {CHROME|CONTENT}

 Usage:
    $firefox_driver->set_context( $context );

 Output:
    BOOLEAN - success or failure

SEE ALSO

Please see those modules/websites for more information related to this module.

BUGS

Please report any bugs or feature requests on the bugtracker website https://github.com/gempesaw/Selenium-Remote-Driver/issues

When submitting a bug or request, please include a test-file or a patch to an existing test-file that illustrates the bug or desired feature.

AUTHORS

Current Maintainers:

  • Daniel Gempesaw <gempesaw@gmail.com>

  • Emmanuel Peroumalnaïk <peroumalnaik.emmanuel@gmail.com>

Previous maintainers:

  • Luke Closs <cpan@5thplane.com>

  • Mark Stosberg <mark@stosberg.com>

Original authors:

  • Aditya Ivaturi <ivaturi@gmail.com>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2010-2011 Aditya Ivaturi, Gordon Child

Copyright (c) 2014-2017 Daniel Gempesaw

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.