Selenium won't launch Firefox under Snow Leopard

The latest FireFox (3.5.*) includes a version of sqlite that drives Selenium nuts. The basic problem is that Selenium is allowing FireFox's (whacko) version of sqlite to take precedence over the OS-supplied one.

The error message you'll see in the Selenium server log files looks like this:

dyld: Library not loaded: /usr/lib/libsqlite3.dylib
Referenced from: /System/Library/Frameworks/Security.framework/
Versions/A/Security
Reason: Incompatible library version: Security requires version
9.0.0 or later, but libsqlite3.dylib provides version 1.0.0

The fix is to disavow Selenium of that silly notion, which entails setting the DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH correctly. This is all explicated in the Selenium bug report.

The problem has already been fixed in the Selenium trunk, so the solution is to build your own Selenium. It's quite trivial, so here goes:

First, grab the patch, then execute these commands:

svn co http://svn.openqa.org/svn/selenium-rc/trunk .
patch -p0 < snow-leopard.patch
mvn install
cd $WHEREEVER_YOU_KEEP_SELENIUM
cp selenium-server.jar selenium-server.jar.bak
cp selenium-server/target/selenium-server-1.0.2-SNAPSHOT-standalone.jar selenium-server.jar

That takes care of the prob.

Labels: firefox, macos, selenium

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