How to configure chromium settings in a selenium session

Question

Recently I upgraded to a recent version of chromium[1] and now third party cookies are disabled by default. Now one of my tests fails against selenium[2] using chromedriver[3] because it relies on a third party cookie (Facebook).

The setting that I want to change seems to reside in the file /path/to/profile/Default/Preferences in JSON as something like:

{
  ...
  "profile" : {
    ...
    "block_third_party_cookies": false,
    ...
  }
  ...
}

I want to configure chromium such that this setting is false in my selenium session.

Things I have tried that failed:

I am using the perl driver library that allows me to pass some options that will be used during session creation.

1. I tried to change the profile directory and the following appeared in my selenium server output:

   14:33:53.312 INFO - Executing: [new session: {platform=ANY, acceptSslCerts=true, javascriptEnabled=true, browserName=chrome, proxy={proxyType=direct}, chrome.switches=--user-data-dir=/path/to/profile/..., version=}] at URL: /session)

   I would think that this approach should work but that I just need to know the correct parameter name(s).

2. Changing the setting in /etc/chromium/master_preferences

[1] Chromium version 31.0.1650.63 Debian
[2] Selenium standalone version 2.25.0
[3] Chromedriver version 2.6.232917

Answer 1

The solution I found uses the chromeOptions.args capability to set a profile. I created a profile template with the correct setting. I used this profile as a template.

In the profile template directory there is a single file named Default/Preferences with the contents:

{
  "profile": {
    "block_third_party_cookies": false
  }
}

The perl test file looks something like:

use Selenium::Remote::Driver;
use File::Temp 'tempdir';

my $template_dir = '/path/to/template/dir/';
my $dirname = tempdir(
  'chrome_user_data_XXXXXX',
  DIR     => '/tmp',
  CLEANUP => 1,
);
system(qq|cp -a $template_dir/* $dirname|) == 0
  or die("Could not copy $template_dir/* to $dirname");

my $driver = Selenium::Remote::Driver->new(
  browser_name       => 'chrome',
  extra_capabilities => {
    args => ["user-data-dir=$dirname"],
  },
);