Selenium: HTTP Status 404

Warning, another geeky log entry.

Today I was working with Selenium, the free web testing tool.

I ran into an interesting problem where I was trying to connect to an SSL connections, but I got this error:

HTTP Status 404 – /selenium-server/core/RemoteRunner.html

If you don’t know why /selenium-server/ is being stuck onto your destination URL, or why you are passing a URL to the class constructor DefaultSelenium in the first place, then you need to go read the Selenium RC: Tutorial and not casually browse it, specifically the section entitled The Same Origin Policy.

  • Advice about certificates wasn’t working.
  • I discovered Firefox 3 Beta wasn’t working with Selenium IDE, and switch back to Firefox 2.0.0.16, which at least allowed http connections to work.
  • I used my own Firefox profiles with *custom instead of *firefox

I even installed the Cyber Villians CA certificate, which is mentioned in the Selenium RC: Tutorial under Support for HTTPS.

Still, I was getting the 404 Error when using https, but not http.

Then I found it.

Firefox’s profile got messed up as I was switching between versions. Under Tools / Options…, Network Tab, Settings…, Manual proxy configuration, while HTTP Proxy had localhost and port 4444, the “Use this proxy server for all protocols” became unchecked. It should be checked.

Made sense, too. If https is not going through the proxy, then Selenium couldn’t do it’s magic.

Also, make sure that No Proxy for is blank, this is normally localhost, 127.0.0.1, and other local resources; only in this case, you do want to go through your local Selenium proxy.