Start Firefox with specific profile

WebPageTest Private Instances
1

Hi there. Is there a way to start a test using a specific profile in Firefox?

I’m running into an issue in Firefox. I’m trying to run a test against a secure (https) site in our internal development environment but the images will not load because there are self assigned certs being used on our internal development web servers. The way to go around this manually in Firefox is to add a security exception.

I tried to create a Firefox profile called “WPT User” and manually accepted the certs under that profile. Then I updated the wptdriver.ini file to use the “WPT User” profile, but when I try to run a test, the browser starts up and nothing happens. The test does not start and the driver times out and closes the browser.

Am I on the right track and I’m missing one thing? Or am I completely off?

Here’s the Firefox settings in my wptdriver.ini file:

[Firefox]
exe="C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
options='-profile "WPT User" -no-remote

Thanks in advance!

2

I’ve not had time to try this on my instance yet but a few observations:

According to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Command_Line_Options you want -P for a named profile (-profile is for a profile path)

Also is the single quote on the start of the options meant to be there?

Cheers

Andy

3

You need to be careful specifying a custom profile. If you can take the changes from the profile and add them to the profile “template” that WPT uses (templates/firefox) you should have better luck.

WPT generally relies on being able to blow away the profile (that’s how it clears the cache between runs) and it installs a default profile that includes an extension that manages the browser. By running a custom profile, the extension isn’t installed which is why it is just hanging at the blank page. You could install the extension but then the cache still wouldn’t get cleared between runs.