How to perform Basic Authentication for FirefoxDriver, ChromeDriver and IEdriver in Selenium WebDriver?

Question

I am using the Selenium-Firefox-driver and Selenium-Chrome-Driver version 2.0a5 (Web Driver API), and I am trying to test a web app that has BASIC authentication (there is a popup that come up to authenticate the user when I hit whatever page, the popup is not part of the HTML).

Now, I need to a strategy to authenticate the user in Firefox, Chrome and IE (I'm going to import the IE Driver soon).

I was reading in few articles that I can set a Firefox profile for instance..something like:

FirefoxProfile ffProfile = new FirefoxProfile();
ffProfile.setPreference("network.http.phishy-userpass-length", 255);
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(ffProfile);
driver.get("http://username:password@hostname");  

but it doesn't seem to work for me. Does anyone have a working solution for those browsers?

Answer 1

I got it to work with Firefox webdriver by the following:

profile.SetPreference("network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris", "google.com");
driver = new FirefoxDriver(profile);

driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://user:pwd@google.com");

Answer 2

True, BASIC HTTP authentication is not currently supported but I got it working now for FF and for Chrome.

The code I wrote in the questions works for those drivers. I just tried using FF3.6 as Firefox default browser (installed in Firefox folder) instead of FF4 (not supported yet). For IE, i may try to disable the authentication through Windows Registry.

This page http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=34 may help.

Answer 3

Add this New Firefox Profile on your code

ProfilesIni profile = new ProfilesIni();
FirefoxProfile myprofile = profile.getProfile("myProjectProfile"); //replace "myProjectProfile" with your profile"
WebDriver driver = new FirefoxDriver(myprofile);

Firefox configuration settings

This works fine without prompting any authentication when you do the following settings..

• Type "about:config" on your FF url
• Now type "Proxy" in the search field
• Make sure "signon.autologin.proxy" is set "true" (By default it is "false")

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Load Default/Custom Chrome Profile to run tests using Selenium WebDriver

---

1. Download chromedriver.exe
2. Extract the chromedriver_win_26.0.1383.0.zip folder and locate .exe file to C:/ folder

Add this Script on your JAVA code

DesiredCapabilities capability = DesiredCapabilities.chrome();
System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:/chromedriver.exe");
capability.setCapability("chrome.switches", Arrays.asList("–disable-extensions"));
capability.setCapability("chrome.binary", "C:/Users/user_name/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/Application/chrome.exe");
ChromeOptions options = new ChromeOptions();
options.addArguments("user-data-dir=C:/Users/user_name/AppData/Local/Google/Chrome/User Data/Default");
driver = new ChromeDriver(capability);

Note: IE doesn't need profile setup to run tests because they run on Server user while Firefox and Chrome works with binary.

Answer 4

If you want to enable the http auth in Internet explorer, you have to edit the registry and add this (create keys if they are not present):

1. in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_HTTP_USERNAME_PASSWORD_DISABLE, create a DWORD iexplore.exe with a value of 0

2. in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\MAIN\FeatureControl\FEATURE_HTTP_USERNAME_PASSWORD_DISABLE, create a DWORD iexplore.exe with a value of 0

3. Close and reopen Internet explorer

If you have a x64 IE, the path is a bit different :

• HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main\FeatureControl\FEATURE_HTTP_USERNAME_PASSWORD_DISABLE

Answer 5

For more portability, this can be handled by stub API and using Alert.

Example Java code (sample):

import org.openqa.selenium.Alert;
import org.openqa.selenium.security.Credentials;
public void authenticateUsing(Credentials credentials) {
    private final Alert alert;
    alert.authenticateUsing(credentials);
}

See also: auth_tests.py

Or by sending keys manually like:

SendKeys("user");
SendKeys("{TAB}");
SendKeys("password");
SendKeys("~"); // Enter

See also the following feature request: #453 Portable BASIC Auth at GitHub

Related:

• How to send Basic Authentication headers in Selenium? at QA SE

Answer 6

There is a solution for performing authentication with Selenium 1.x by manually setting the HTTP headers at http://mogotest.com/blog/2010/06/23/how-to-perform-basic-auth-in-selenium but I don't think this is transferable to Selenium 2, as you don't have access to the headers.

According to the information here 'Basic Authentication support for Selenium 2' was added in Selenium 2 Beta 2 but looking through the source code I can only see it implemented as a way of securing Remote Selenium Servers against anonymous access.

So I think the answer is that BASIC HTTP authentication is not currently supported.

Answer 7

I was not able to use the basic authentication with Selenium 2 and Chrome (Due a bug with Chrome), so I created an extension for Chrome that sends the basic authentication credentials automatically (See https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/basic-authentication-auto/dgpgkkfheijbcgjklcbnokoleebmeokn).