Facebook test accounts using selenium - failing to log in my fake users

Question

I am programmatically creating test accounts, and then immediately trying to log in w/ them using a selenium driven browser. Unfortunately, the browser is just redirected to the facebook homepage. I can briefly see what appears to be the correct url prior to the redirect flash by, so I have no reason to believe the browser isn't going where I intend it to.

That said, if create a fake account, and then just paste the login_url into a browser, things work fine. Anyone have any idea why that might be unique about using Selenium here? Is there anything I need to do to prepare the browser for https connections or anything?

All I'm doing is this: (using capybara and the Selenium web driver)

visit @fake_user.login_url

---

https://www.facebook.com/platform/test_account_login.php?user_id=100002152974488&n=ILRvb8Lqf2cq05t

GET /platform/test_account_login.php?user_id=100002152974488&n=ILRvb8Lqf2cq05t HTTP/1.1 Host: www.facebook.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.1 302 Found Cache-Control: private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT Location: http://www.facebook.com/ P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p" Pragma: no-cache Set-Cookie: datr=d3J_TWSAN5uIXyh94O1YJkJ8; expires=Thu, 14-Mar-2013 14:06:47 GMT; path=/; domain=.facebook.com; httponly Set-Cookie: lsd=-Lv-N; path=/; domain=.facebook.com Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 X-Powered-By: HPHP X-FB-Server: 10.52.145.67 X-Cnection: close Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:06:47 GMT

Content-Length: 0

http://www.facebook.com/

GET / HTTP/1.1 Host: www.facebook.com User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6; en-US; rv:1.9.2.15) Gecko/20110303 Firefox/3.6.15 Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,/;q=0.8 Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5 Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7 Keep-Alive: 115 Connection: keep-alive Cookie: datr=d3J_TWSAN5uIXyh94O1YJkJ8; lsd=-Lv-N

HTTP/1.1 200 OK Cache-Control: private, no-cache, no-store, must-revalidate Expires: Sat, 01 Jan 2000 00:00:00 GMT P3P: CP="Facebook does not have a P3P policy. Learn why here: http://fb.me/p3p" Pragma: no-cache Set-Cookie: reg_fb_gate=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F; path=/; domain=.facebook.com Set-Cookie: reg_fb_ref=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2F; path=/; domain=.facebook.com Content-Encoding: gzip Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 X-Powered-By: HPHP X-FB-Server: 10.52.163.25 X-Cnection: close Transfer-Encoding: chunked Date: Tue, 15 Mar 2011 14:06:47 GMT

Answer 1

Visit Facebook home page before trying to visit login url:

visit "https://www.facebook.com"
visit @fake_user.login_url

I haven't checked the headers, but I guess Facebook sets some cookies that are needed to log in.