As 2009 ends, many people reflect on the past year. Earlier this year, VentureWire celebrated their ten year anniversary and they published this fascinating timeline of the last ten years in the venture capital world. A fun trip down memory lane.
Archive for December, 2009
VentureWire Celebrates 10 Years
Saturday, December 26th, 2009Selenium, Firefox and Self Signed Certificates
Sunday, December 20th, 2009A little while ago, I needed to run some Selenium processes against a different server which was https only with a self signed certificate. When Selenium fired up, I saw the SSL certificate warnings followed by the test failing. Even when I inserted a pause into my script so I would have time to add the security exception, the test still failed.
A search on the web led to Elliot Smith’s post entitled Dealing with self-signed SSL certificates when running Selenium server with Firefox. At the time, the post was only a few days old. It was exactly what I needed and worked like a champ. Thank you Elliot!
I would add to Elliot’s procedure that the cert_override.txt and cert8.db files can be added to source control. Even if the person executing the tests has never followed the procedure regarding creating a Firefox profile, the process will still work.
Finally, a minor warning. If you find that you need to add additional self-signed certificates, you will need to do that as part of a full-fledged Firefox profile – not the limited version created here. In that case, just like the first time, you will need to delete all of the Firefox created files and directories except cert_override.txt and cert8.db just like the first time it was setup. (I suppose you could also copy the 2 cert*.* files from a different full fledged profile – as long as you were confident regarding the contents of those files.)