How can I handle certificates when testing pages with Selenium

Question

I'm using Selenium for launching the browser for tests. How can I handle webpages which ask the browser to accept certificates? The problem is that for different browsers, the certificate prompt is different, meaning even the elements would be different. Look below for example.

In Firefox, the website asks to accept certificates like this:

In IE, it looks like this:

And in Google Chrome, it looks like this:

So how can I automate the acceptance of any website's certificate when I launch any browser? I'm writing the Selenium code in Python.

Answer 1

In Firefox, you should set 'accept_untrusted_certs' of FirefoxProfile() option to True. Code:

from selenium import webdriver

profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
profile.accept_untrusted_certs = True

driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)
driver.get('https://cacert.org/')

driver.close()

In case of Chrome, you have to add --ignore-certificate-errors to ChromeOptions() argument:

from selenium import webdriver

options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
options.add_argument('--ignore-certificate-errors')

driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=options)
driver.get('https://cacert.org/')

driver.close()

And with Internet Explorer, you have to set acceptSslCerts desired capability:

from selenium import webdriver

capabilities = webdriver.DesiredCapabilities().INTERNETEXPLORER
capabilities['acceptSslCerts'] = True

driver = webdriver.Ie(capabilities=capabilities)
driver.get('https://cacert.org/')

driver.close()

In fact we can use desired capabilities for pretty much every browser. Look at the Desired Capabilities documentation for how it is done: https://code.google.com/p/selenium/wiki/DesiredCapabilities