Jenkins can't launch selenium tests (Timed out waiting for profile to be created)

Question

Jenkins can't launch selenium tests (ubuntu) error

11:26:24.652 INFO - Started org.openqa.jetty.jetty.Server@ab50cd 11:26:24.738 INFO - Preparing Firefox profile... HTML suite exception seen: java.lang.RuntimeException: Timed out waiting for profile to be created! at org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.FirefoxChromeLauncher.waitForFullProfileToBeCreated(FirefoxChromeLauncher.java:360) at org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.FirefoxChromeLauncher.populateCustomProfileDirectory(FirefoxChromeLauncher.java:114) at org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.FirefoxChromeLauncher.launch(FirefoxChromeLauncher.java:83) at org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.FirefoxChromeLauncher.launchHTMLSuite(FirefoxChromeLauncher.java:405) at org.openqa.selenium.server.browserlaunchers.FirefoxLauncher.launchHTMLSuite(FirefoxLauncher.java:105) at org.openqa.selenium.server.htmlrunner.HTMLLauncher.runHTMLSuite(HTMLLauncher.java:121) at org.openqa.selenium.server.htmlrunner.HTMLLauncher.runHTMLSuite(HTMLLauncher.java:166) at org.openqa.selenium.server.SeleniumServer.runHtmlSuite(SeleniumServer.java:556) at org.openqa.selenium.server.SeleniumServer.boot(SeleniumServer.java:241) at org.openqa.selenium.server.SeleniumServer.main(SeleniumServer.java:201) at org.openqa.grid.selenium.GridLauncher.main(GridLauncher.java:40)

OS - Ubuntu workstation 11 Jenkins & Selenium - last versions (installed as is it written on sites)

It seems to me that user jenkins have not all the rights, because if i use the same line to execute in terminal, it works selenium starts Firefox & do the suite.

I also put jenkins user in groop root but it also doesn't help.

I'm not qualified in Linux but it seems than trouble is with rights of jenkins user, but i can mistake.

If somebody have solved the problem please write the solution.

Answer 1

I was recently having this issue too.

I first tried the method mentioned here : http://www.spacevatican.org/2008/9/27/selenium-and-firefox-3 However this fix now seems out of date, as the plugin maxVersion properties were all set to 8.something.

The way I fixed it (as mentioned here : http://www.centripetal.ca/blog/2011/02/07/getting-started-with-selenium-and-jenkins/) was to provide Selenium with a firefox profile.

Steps

1. Open up Firefox profile manager : $ firefox -ProfileManager
2. Create a new profile, called Selenium
3. Now, when running the selenium command, add "-firefoxProfileTemplate "/home/{username}/.mozilla/firefox/{profile dir}" to the command. (where {username} is your username and {profile dir} is the profile directory, which for me was "6f2um01h.Selenium"

My final Selenium command was

$ sudo java -jar /var/lib/jenkins/tools/selenium/selenium-server.jar -htmlSuite *firefox http://google.com "/var/lib/jenkins/jobs/Selenium setup test/workspace/tests/test-testsuite.html" "/var/lib/jenkins/jobs/Selenium setup test/workspace/results/results.html" -log=/tmp/selenium.log -debug=true -firefoxProfileTemplate "/home/username/.mozilla/firefox/6f2um01h.Selenium"

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I would also recommend copying and pasting the shell command that jenkins is using into Terminal, to save having to run it through Jenkins each time.

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N.B. I'm currently finding that Selenium now hangs (and doesn't crash) on the next step of it's process (Launching Firefox) but this seems like a different bug which I've added to stackoverflow here : Selenium hangs when launching Firefox on Ubuntu