Selenium Firefox Profile Missing on Linux

Question

I am trying to get Selenium working on a Ubuntu VM. I'm having a heck of a time doing it to. No matter what I do, I always get the following dialogue:

I do not need to use any profile in particular. I thought initially that Selenium\Gecko creates a temp profile for it's instance. Below are all the things I've tried. Further, I've also tried running as sudo, and\or setting ownership of the profile to nobody as well as setting the permissions to the profile directory to 777. None of which proved fruitful. I have seen other SO posts regarding this, none of which have provided me with anything leading to an answer which is obviously why I am here.

# create a new Firefox session
# binary = FirefoxBinary('/snap/bin/firefox')
# binary = FirefoxBinary('/usr/local/bin/geckodriver')
profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile(profile_directory='/home/jaberwocky/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/tm4nraze.selenium')
# profile.set_preference("browser.download.folderList",2)
# profile.set_preference("browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting",False)
# profile.set_preference("browser.download.dir", os.getcwd())
# profile.set_preference("browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk", "application/octet-stream")
driver = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile)
driver.implicitly_wait(20)
driver.get(base_url)

python_button = driver.find_element_by_class_name('sh-hide')
python_button.click()

Selenium Version 3.141.0

Firefox Version 65.0.2

Python Version 3.7.2

Linux Distribution Ubuntu Budgie 18.04.2 LTS

There really isn't a lot of information out there on this problem. What am I doing wrong here?

Update: I found a log file for each execution of gecko. Here is what it shows:

ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
/snap/firefox/185/bin/desktop-launch: line 174: /home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/user-dirs.dirs: No such file or directory
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
cp: cannot create regular file '/home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/': Not a directory
/snap/firefox/185/bin/desktop-launch: line 177: /home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/user-dirs.dirs.md5sum: No such file or directory
/snap/firefox/185/bin/desktop-launch: line 177: /home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/user-dirs.locale.md5sum: No such file or directory
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
1551441977454   mozrunner::runner   INFO    Running command: "/snap/bin/firefox" "-marionette" "-foreground" "-no-remote" "-profile" "/tmp/rust_mozprofile.kvmA0GU2ZdrC"
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
/snap/firefox/185/bin/desktop-launch: line 174: /home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/user-dirs.dirs: No such file or directory
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
cp: cannot create regular file '/home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/': Not a directory
/snap/firefox/185/bin/desktop-launch: line 177: /home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/user-dirs.dirs.md5sum: No such file or directory
/snap/firefox/185/bin/desktop-launch: line 177: /home/addohm/snap/firefox/common/.config/user-dirs.locale.md5sum: No such file or directory
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
ERROR: ld.so: object '/lib/$LIB/liblsp.so' from /etc/ld.so.preload cannot be preloaded (cannot open shared object file): ignored.
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"
Gtk-Message: Failed to load module "canberra-gtk-module"

(firefox:27487): Gtk-WARNING **: Error loading theme icon 'dialog-warning' for stock: Icon 'dialog-warning' not present in theme Pocillo

There is no ~/snap/firefox/common/.config/ but there is a ~/snap/firefox/current/.config/.

Answer 1

Geckodriver tries to load the profile from a different directory as /home/username/snap/firefox... because its not configured to the snap installation. If you still want to use the snap installation, because it gives you features, which the apt installation doesn't provide (like in my case), then you can still do it this way:

from selenium.webdriver.firefox.options import Options
options = Options()
options.add_argument("-profile")
# put the root directory your default profile path here, you can check it by opening Firefox and then pasting 'about:profiles' into the url field 
options.add_argument("/home/username/snap/firefox/common/.mozilla/firefox/dhklfoeb.default-18236362302398")
browser=webdriver.Firefox(options=options)

Answer 2

It seems this issue is directly related to having installed Firefox using Snap instead of apt.

Reference: https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2398478

It worked right out of the gate with no specific profile.

Unfortunately if you install Firefox using the in-built software package manager, it will install via snap. So just be careful of that and install with:

sudo apt install firefox

Answer 3

It seems that directly use a profile created by Firefox will fail.

You can try to make a copy folder and use it.

As to the reason why directly selecting the profile fails, you can view the details from here: webdriver.FirefoxProfile(): Is it possible to use a profile without making a copy of it?