I hope the preceding series of posts has been useful. To wrap things up, I want to share a GitHub repository that contains sample code for each of the items we've discussed. It includes an ASP.NET Core demo web site that implements Basic, Digest, and NTLM authentication. It includes sample Selenium code using BenderProxy (version 1.1.2 or later) and PassedBall (version 1.2.0 or later) to automate the site. The Selenium code runs in a console application, which will await you pressing the Enter key before shutting down the proxy and quitting the browser. This will allow you to see the state of the browser before everything quits. Other features of the sample repo include working factory classes for Selenium sessions and the demo cases themselves.
To make the demo in the source repo properly work, you must run it on Windows, because we are enabling NTLM authentication. Also, you will need administrative access on your Windows machine, which is unfortunate, but there is no other way to get the development web server to listen on a host name other than "localhost". If you change the test to navigate to the site on "localhost", the browser will likely bypass the proxy, because most browsers bypass proxies browsing on localhost without taking other configuration steps. By default, the demo project uses www.seleniumhq-test.test and port 5000, but you can use whatever you want. Here's how to configure your test environment so that the demo app will work properly:
From an elevated ("Run as Administrator") command prompt, edit your hosts file to contain a mapped entry for the host you wish to use. The hosts file can be edited in any text editor, including Notepad, so the following command will open it:
notepad.exe %WinDir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
Once open, add the following line:
127.0.0.1 <host name>
Be sure to substitute your preferred host name for <host name> . Save and close the hosts file. As an aside, this is a very useful technique for Selenium code to simulate navigation to external sites without actually having to navigate outside one's local machine.
Also in the elevated command prompt, execute the following command:
netsh http add urlacl url="http://<host name>:<port>/" user=everyone
Be sure to substitute your preferred host name and port for <host name> and <port> respectively. You should see a message that the URL reservation was successfully added. Now, this is a dangerous command, because it does open up a URL reservation for everyone, so you don't want to leave this permanently in place. You can remove it at any time after you're done using the sample by using another elevated command prompt to execute:
netsh http remove urlacl url="http://<host name>:<port>/"
Once you've added the hosts file entry and the URL ACL, you're ready to load and run the authentication tests. Open the solution in Visual Studio 2019, and you should be able to build and run. When running, the solution runs a console application that will launch the test web app, start the proxy server, start a browser configured to use the proxy with Selenium, navigate to a protected URL for a specific authentication scheme, and then wait for the Enter key to be pressed. This will let you examine the browser to validate that, yes, the authentication succeeded You can also examine the diagnostic output written to the console by the test code, which describes the WWW-Authenticate and Authorization headers being used. Once you've validated to your satisfaction that in the browser really did authenticate using Selenium and without prompting the user, you can press Enter, which will quit the browser, stop the proxy server, and shut down the test web app. As an extra validation step, you can also start the test web app from Visual Studio and manually navigate to the URLs to validate that they really do prompt for credentials when browsed to.
Here's the Main method of the test app:
As you can see, you can change the browser being used (line 5 in the listing above), and the authentication type (line 9 in the listing above) being tested by changing the commented lines in the main method. If you decided to use a different host name or port, you can also change that by uncommenting and changing the appropriate lines (lines 15 and 16 in the listing above, respectively).
Hopefully, this series has given you some insights into how browsers perform authentication, and how it's possible to automate this using Selenium, without resorting to other UI automation tools. Happy coding!
To make the demo in the source repo properly work, you must run it on Windows, because we are enabling NTLM authentication. Also, you will need administrative access on your Windows machine, which is unfortunate, but there is no other way to get the development web server to listen on a host name other than "localhost". If you change the test to navigate to the site on "localhost", the browser will likely bypass the proxy, because most browsers bypass proxies browsing on localhost without taking other configuration steps. By default, the demo project uses www.seleniumhq-test.test and port 5000, but you can use whatever you want. Here's how to configure your test environment so that the demo app will work properly:
From an elevated ("Run as Administrator") command prompt, edit your hosts file to contain a mapped entry for the host you wish to use. The hosts file can be edited in any text editor, including Notepad, so the following command will open it:
notepad.exe %WinDir%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts
Once open, add the following line:
127.0.0.1 <host name>
Be sure to substitute your preferred host name for <host name> . Save and close the hosts file. As an aside, this is a very useful technique for Selenium code to simulate navigation to external sites without actually having to navigate outside one's local machine.
Also in the elevated command prompt, execute the following command:
netsh http add urlacl url="http://<host name>:<port>/" user=everyone
Be sure to substitute your preferred host name and port for <host name> and <port> respectively. You should see a message that the URL reservation was successfully added. Now, this is a dangerous command, because it does open up a URL reservation for everyone, so you don't want to leave this permanently in place. You can remove it at any time after you're done using the sample by using another elevated command prompt to execute:
netsh http remove urlacl url="http://<host name>:<port>/"
Once you've added the hosts file entry and the URL ACL, you're ready to load and run the authentication tests. Open the solution in Visual Studio 2019, and you should be able to build and run. When running, the solution runs a console application that will launch the test web app, start the proxy server, start a browser configured to use the proxy with Selenium, navigate to a protected URL for a specific authentication scheme, and then wait for the Enter key to be pressed. This will let you examine the browser to validate that, yes, the authentication succeeded You can also examine the diagnostic output written to the console by the test code, which describes the WWW-Authenticate and Authorization headers being used. Once you've validated to your satisfaction that in the browser really did authenticate using Selenium and without prompting the user, you can press Enter, which will quit the browser, stop the proxy server, and shut down the test web app. As an extra validation step, you can also start the test web app from Visual Studio and manually navigate to the URLs to validate that they really do prompt for credentials when browsed to.
Here's the Main method of the test app:
As you can see, you can change the browser being used (line 5 in the listing above), and the authentication type (line 9 in the listing above) being tested by changing the commented lines in the main method. If you decided to use a different host name or port, you can also change that by uncommenting and changing the appropriate lines (lines 15 and 16 in the listing above, respectively).
Hopefully, this series has given you some insights into how browsers perform authentication, and how it's possible to automate this using Selenium, without resorting to other UI automation tools. Happy coding!
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