Using Custom User Profile in Chrome

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Custom user profiles help you emulate settings such as pre-installed extensions, specific location, language, etc. for your web app test automation in Chrome browser.

To do the same, create a new profile, customize it as per your requirements by installing required extensions and changing the settings. After that, you can select the profile using Desired Capabilities in Testsigma while starting a Test Session.

You should already know how to add Desired Capabilities to your Tests. Refer to the documentation on configuring desired capabilities

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Steps for using Custom User Profile in Testsigma

1. Finding your current Profile path
2. Making changes in the Profile folder
3. Using the Desired Capability

1. Finding your current Profile path

While executing, you can check the current Profile location by going to the following URL:
chrome://version

Location of Chrome Browser Profile(default profile)

OS	Profile Path
Windows 7, 8.1, and 10	C:\\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default
Mac OS X El Capitan	Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default
Linux	/home/<username>/.config/google-chrome/default

Workaround to use user-defined profile for Executing Tests on Testsigma

We could use the —profile-directory argument for specifying the User Profile. However, due to a known bug in Chrome, you might need to do the following workaround and use the —user-data-dir argument.

2. Making changes in Profile folder (workaround)

1. Open your default File Explorer (Windows Explorer - Windows, Nautilus - Linux and Files - Mac) and navigate to the location - C:\Users<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Profile 1

2. Create a folder named ‘Default’ there and copy the contents of ‘Profile 1’ directory deselecting the recently created ‘Default’ folder.

3. Paste the copied contents inside the ‘Default’ folder.

3. Using the Desired Capability

After that, you can use Desired Capability in the following format for using a user-defined profile in Testsigma. The following Desired Capability can be used to start Chrome Browser during an automation session using a user-defined profile.

Name	Data Type	Value
goog:chromeOptions	String	{“args”:[“user-data-dir=/path/to/your/custom/profile”]}