Python Selenium setting path to firefox profile (ubuntu)

firefoxpythonselenium

I have set the path to a newly created Firefox profile in Ubuntu OS using python & Selenium. But when I run the python script I am getting an error

OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied

I have changed the permissions on the file to 755 and I am still getting the error and also tried sudo.

sudo chmod 775 /home/student/.mozilla/firefox/gwi6uqpe.Default\ User2/

This is the start of my python script:-

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.keys import Keys
from selenium.webdriver.firefox.firefox_binary import FirefoxBinary
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
import sys, time
import time

binary = FirefoxBinary('/home/student/.mozilla/firefox/gwi6uqpe.Default User2')
browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)

And this is the error message.

Traceback (most recent call last):

File "default2.py", line 9, in
browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_binary=binary)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py", line 78, in init
self.binary, timeout)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/extension_connection.py", line 51, in init
self.binary.launch_browser(self.profile, timeout=timeout)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 67, in launch_browser
self._start_from_profile_path(self.profile.path)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/selenium/webdriver/firefox/firefox_binary.py", line 90, in _start_from_profile_path
env=self._firefox_env)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 710, in init
errread, errwrite)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1327, in _execute_child
raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 13] Permission denied

How do I get around this, please.

Best Answer

On my machine, ~/.mozilla/firefox and it's subdirectories have user:usergroup 700 permissions. Is your script being executed by the student user? Otherwise, it will get permission denied. As an experiment, you could try giving .mozilla/firefox and .mozilla/firefox/profiles 766 permissions. I wouldn't run a production environment like that, but you could make a group with permissions and add your other user to that group.

EDIT: FirefoxBinary is not what to use for specifying a profile. Use FirefoxProfile instead:

profile = FirefoxProfile('/home/student/.mozilla/firefox/gwi6uqpe.Default')
browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)

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Python – How to you profile a Python script

Python includes a profiler called cProfile. It not only gives the total running time, but also times each function separately, and tells you how many times each function was called, making it easy to determine where you should make optimizations.

You can call it from within your code, or from the interpreter, like this:

import cProfile
cProfile.run('foo()')

Even more usefully, you can invoke the cProfile when running a script:

python -m cProfile myscript.py

To make it even easier, I made a little batch file called 'profile.bat':

python -m cProfile %1

So all I have to do is run:

profile euler048.py

And I get this:

1007 function calls in 0.061 CPU seconds

Ordered by: standard name
ncalls  tottime  percall  cumtime  percall filename:lineno(function)
    1    0.000    0.000    0.061    0.061 <string>:1(<module>)
 1000    0.051    0.000    0.051    0.000 euler048.py:2(<lambda>)
    1    0.005    0.005    0.061    0.061 euler048.py:2(<module>)
    1    0.000    0.000    0.061    0.061 {execfile}
    1    0.002    0.002    0.053    0.053 {map}
    1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 {method 'disable' of '_lsprof.Profiler objects}
    1    0.000    0.000    0.000    0.000 {range}
    1    0.003    0.003    0.003    0.003 {sum}

EDIT: Updated link to a good video resource from PyCon 2013 titled Python Profiling
Also via YouTube.

Python – Selenium: FirefoxProfile exception Can’t load the profile

Update:

Selenium team fixed in latest version. For almost all environments the fix is:

pip install -U selenium

Unclear at which version it was fixed (apparently r13122), but certainly by 2.26.0 (current at time of update) it is fixed.

This error means that _wait_until_connectable is timing out, because for some reason, the code cannot connect to the webdriver extension that has been loaded into the firefox.

I have just reported an error to selenium where I am getting this error because I'm trying to use a proxy and only 2 of the 4 configured changes in the profile have been accepted by firefox, so the proxy isn't configured to talk to the extension. Not sure why this is happening...

https://github.com/seleniumhq/selenium-google-code-issue-archive/issues/2061

Best Answer

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Python – Selenium: FirefoxProfile exception Can’t load the profile

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