Selenium Firefox WebDriver and proxies.

Selenium is an functional web application testing system. It really helps developing test cases for apps that have a lot of logic implemented in the frontend layer. Selenium provides WebDrivers for most popular browsers, like IE, Chrome and last buy not least: Firefox. Of course Selenium has python bindings, which makes it even better. 

Suppose you need to use proxy servers for some of your scenarios (unique visitors). Since each test case may use many proxies, changing the global system proxy settings is a rather bad idea. Fortunately HTTP proxies may be configured in a web browser. If you inspect the Firefox about:config panel, you will notice many properties that configure how your browser really acts. We'll be interested in the network.proxy.* settings.

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException

try:
    proxy = "192.168.1.3"
    port = 8080

    fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
    fp.set_preference('network.proxy.ssl_port', int(port))
    fp.set_preference('network.proxy.ssl', proxy)
    fp.set_preference('network.proxy.http_port', int(port))
    fp.set_preference('network.proxy.http', proxy)
    fp.set_preference('network.proxy.type', 1)

    browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=fp)
    browser.set_page_load_timeout(15)
    browser.get('http://192.168.1.1/test')
    print browser.find_element_by_id('my_div').text

except TimeoutException as te: 
    print "timeout"
except Exception as ex: 
    print ex.message
finally:
    browser.quit()

First we need to configure our profile by setting the HTTP, and HTTPS proxies. Secondly we have to tell Firefox to start using them: network.proxy.type -> 1. Finally we create an instance of Firefox with our proxy settings and execute out test routine.

Have fun!

~KR