Selenium in Python: Setting Firefox profile to webdriver does not seem to work

Question

I want to be able to download a file from a website with a Python script by using Selenium. My problem is that creating and setting a Firefox Profile to the Firefox webdriver instance does not seem to work... Here is my code:

 profile = webdriver.FirefoxProfile();

 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/xml");
 profile.update_preferences();

 browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile);

Even with the settings above, the open/save dialog box still opens up and the download does not happen. I then tried to do something simpler:

profile = webdriver.FireforProfile();

profile.set_preference("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.google.com");
profile.update_preferences();

browser = webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=profile);

And all i get is firefox to open, that's it. This brings me to believe that the profile is not being set to the driver. Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

For anyone who comes along this here is a function that will return a webdriver with some common options. It shouldn't have a hardcoded path to the Firefox profile but I haven't gotten around to that yet

def get_firefox_driver(download_dir=None, use_profile=False, headless=False):

    if download_dir is None:
        download_dir = os.getcwd()
    if use_profile:
        try:
            fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile(r'C:\Users\MDDT0040\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\u5jvcbqp.dev-edition-default-1525796820341',)
        except:
            print('cant get profile')
            fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()
    else:
        fp = webdriver.FirefoxProfile()

    fp.set_preference("browser.download.folderList", int(2))
    fp.set_preference("browser.download.manager.showWhenStarting", False)
    fp.set_preference("browser.download.manager.showAlertOnComplete", False)
    fp.set_preference("browser.download.dir", download_dir)
    fp.set_preference('browser.helperApps.neverAsk.saveToDisk',
                      "text/csv,text/comma-separated-values,text/comma-separated-values;charset=UTF-8")
    if headless:
        options = Options()
        options.headless = True
        return webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=fp, firefox_options=options)
    else:
        return webdriver.Firefox(firefox_profile=fp)