How to disable loading external urls on seleniumlibrary/robotframework

Question

I started playing with Seleniumlibrary tests (run with robotframework) and as our websites have ads and metrics and so on, every time I run a test those URLs get loaded.

Is there a way to tell selenium/robotframework to not load certain types of URLs or prevent it to load external resources (i.e. everything that is not from localhost).

Answer 1

You can do that with browsermob-proxy. Once you have that installed, you simply setup the proxy and set the blacklist.

ProxyServer server = new ProxyServer(9000)
server.start();
final DesiredCapabilities capabilities = new DesiredCapabilities();
capabilities.setCapability(CapabilityType.PROXY, server.seleniumProxy());
//Send a 200 for all requests to the facebook cdn
server.blacklistRequests("http://.*\\.fbcdn.net/.*", 200); 
//Finish setting up your driver
WebDriver driver = new SomeDriverImpl(capabilities);

I believe the following will work with this python wrapper (the regex might be slightly different):

from browsermobproxy import Server
server = Server("path/to/browsermob-proxy")
server.start()
proxy = server.create_proxy()
proxy.blacklist('http://.*\\.fbcdn.net/.*', 200)
from selenium import webdriver
profile  = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.set_proxy(proxy.selenium_proxy())
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)
...
proxy.stop()
driver.quit()