I just recently started using Selenium Webdriver (as opposed to Selenium 1.0), and I am struggling with an issue that prevents me from running tests at all: When trying to launch webdriver.Firefox() i get an WebDriverException, see traceback
Exception occurs when initializing the Firefox webdriver:
driver = webdriver.Firefox()
After some research (where I found no posts about the same issue), I suspected that the company proxy was to blame, and defined a custom FirefoxProfile to configure a proxy for the webdriver, but that did not help either (tried both "no proxy" and manual proxy settings, equal to company standard). Also tried adding exception for localhost/127.0.0.1, that did not help either.
Has anyone faced the same issue, and hopefully solved it?
So after struggling with the same problem for days on end, I came upon this post: http://osdir.com/ml/selenium-users/2011-07/msg01149.html. Turns out that it may be a permissions error. Try running your python code as a root user
Edit: Thanks steve!
"Got to the bottom of this one.
The issue was not directly to do with permissions but with an
environment variable which was not read when we ran as root.
We have the http_proxy environment variable set with no exclusions for
localhost. This meant that the Python client was attempting to connect
to the WebDriver via the proxy. This was not an issue when run as root
because http_proxy was not set.
This issue can be fixed by setting the no_proxy environment variable
for localhost.
Hope this is a help to anybody that may be experiencing the same
issue.
Steve"
http://osdir.com/ml/selenium-users/2011-07/msg01169.html
I met the same issue on Windows 7 , after uncheck all proxy-related options in "Internet Options" , no error any more
