Question

I’m using the python version of selenium for some testing with django, but firefox webdriver is throwing an URLError exception when trying to start a new session. What I do is:

browser = webdriver.Firefox()

Update: then I do some testing, then I need to close it since the current test is done, but for the next one I need a fresh session, so I try to open a new one

browser.close()
capabilities = webdriver.DesiredCapabilities()
browser.start_session(capabilities.FIREFOX)

but then it throws this:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<console>", line 1, in <module>
  File "/home/user/projects/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 104, in start_session
    'desiredCapabilities': desired_capabilities,
  File "/home/user/projects/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py", line 153, in execute
    response = self.command_executor.execute(driver_command, params)
  File "/home/user/projects/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/remote_connection.py", line 285, in execute
    return self._request(url, method=command_info[0], data=data)
  File "/home/user/projects/myproject/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/remote_connection.py", line 326, in _request
    response = opener.open(request)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 400, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 418, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 378, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1207, in http_open
    return self.do_open(httplib.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 1177, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 111] Connection refused>

The weird thing is that this same steps work perfectly fine with the Chrome webdriver.

Does anyone know why this could be caused?
Thanks in advance for any help

Answer 1

You shouldn’t have to use start_session for that.
On the first line, you are creating a new instance of a local firefox browser. start_session is a method for the remote webdriver.
All you need is:

driver = webdriver.Firefox() #opens new Firefox browser locally
driver.quit() #kills the session
driver = webdriver.Firefox() #opens new Firefox browser locally

Since you are repeating code here, you should have something like this inside your test class

class Test(unittest.Testcase):
    def setUp(self):
        self.driver = webdriver.Firefox()
    def tearDown(self):
        self.driver.quit()
    def test_something(self):
        #do some magic test here
    def test_something_else(self):
        #do some other stuff

That way the browser will launch at the beginning of each test and close at the end of each test.