I'm using Selenium Webdriver (Java) and PhantomJS to test a complex JS driven website. My problem is, that the PhantomJS browser keeps the session between two tests which leads to errors in the test setup.
If I run the tests with Firefox everything works fine because Firefox uses a clean session for every test case.
My first attempt to solve the problem was to just clear the local storage by JS injection. Cookies are deleted by the Selenium exposed API driver.manage().deleteAllCookies();
But executing JavaScript without visiting a page is not allowed. So starting the browser at "about:blank" leads to an error.
So, how do I configure my phantomjs webdriver to clear the session?
I'm using phantomjs and webdriver because the selenium-grid services turned out to be not stable enough. So I start my phantomjs instance like that:
phantomjs --webdriver=1234
New Selenium IDE To create multiple sessions, we shall add the attributes – parallel and thread-count in the XML file. The attribute thread-count controls the number of sessions to be created while executing the tests in a parallel mode. The value of parallel attribute is set to methods.
PhantomJS is a headless Webkit, which has a number of uses. In this example, we'll be using it, in conjunction with Selenium WebDriver, for conducting basic system tests directly from the command line. Since PhantomJS eliminates the need for a graphical browser, tests run much faster.
WebDriver is a remote control interface that enables introspection and control of user agents. It provides a platform- and language-neutral wire protocol as a way for out-of-process programs to remotely instruct the behavior of web browsers.
Why do we need Session Handling? During test execution, the Selenium WebDriver has to interact with the browser all the time to execute given commands.
The fact that PhantomJS keeps sessions between tests is a known problem in GhostDriver, the Selenium Webdriver implementation in PhantomJS.
I suppose that this problem will be fixed with the PhantomJS 2 release. The bug is already fixed in GhostDriver 1.1.1, but there is no PhantomJS version which includes this GhostDriver version.
I know that Selenium Grid has a "cleanSession" option if you use GhostDriver. Also, I am pretty sure the regular WebDriver class has a option for this on a local WebDriver instance:
driver.manage().deleteAllCookies();
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