We are delighted that you want to help improve geckodriver! Mozilla’s WebDriver implementation consists of a few different parts it can be useful to know about:
geckodriver provides the HTTP API described by the [WebDriver protocol] to communicate with Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox and Fennec. It is a standalone executable written in Rust, and can be used with compatible W3C WebDriver clients.
Marionette is the Firefox remote protocol used by geckodriver to communicate with, instrument, and control Gecko. It is built in to Firefox and written in XPCOM flavoured JavaScript.
webdriver is a Rust crate providing interfaces, traits and types, errors, type- and bounds checks, and JSON marshaling for correctly parsing and emitting the WebDriver protocol.
By participating in this project, you agree to abide by the Mozilla Community Participation Guidelines. Here are some guidelines for contributing high-quality and actionable bugs and code.
When opening a new issue or commenting on existing issues, please make sure discussions are related to concrete technical issues with geckodriver or Marionette. Questions or discussions are more appropriate for the mailing list.
For issue reports to be actionable, it must be clear exactly what the observed and expected behaviours are, and how to set up the state required to observe the erroneous behaviour. The most useful thing to provide is a minimal HTML document which permits the problem to be reproduced along with a trace-level log from geckodriver showing the exact wire protocol calls made.
Because of the wide variety and different charateristics of clients used with geckodriver, their stacktraces, logs, and code examples are typically not very useful as they distract from the actual underlying cause. For this reason, we cannot overstate the importance of always providing the trace-level log from geckodriver. Bugs relating to a specific client should be filed with that project.
We welcome you to file issues in the GitHub issue tracker once you are confident it has not already been reported. The [ISSUE_TEMPLATE.md] contains a helpful checklist for things we will want to know about the affected system, reproduction steps, and logs.
geckodriver development follows a rolling release model as we don’t release patches for older versions. It is therefore useful to use the tip-of-tree geckodriver binary, or failing this, the latest release when verifying the problem. geckodriver is only compatible with the current release channel versions of Firefox, and it consequently does not help to report bugs that affect outdated and unsupported Firefoxen. Please always try to verify the issue in the latest Firefox Nightly before you file your bug.
Once we are satisfied the issue raised is of sufficiently actionable
character, we will continue with triaging it and file a bug where it
is appropriate. Bugs specific to geckodriver will be filed in the
[Testing :: geckodriver] component in Bugzilla.
Because there are many moving parts involved remote controlling a web browser, it can be challenging to a new contributor to know where to start. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions!
The canonical source code repository of geckodriver is now
mozilla-central. We continue to use the GitHub issue tracker as
a triage ground before actual, actionable bugs and tasks are filed
in the [Testing :: geckodriver] component on Bugzilla. We also
have a curated set of good first bugs you may consider attempting first.
The purpose of this guide is not to make sure you have a basic development environment set up. For that there is plentiful documentation, such as the Developer Guide to get you rolling. Once you do, we can get started working up your first patch! Remember to reach out to us at any point if you have questions.
geckodriver is written in Rust, a systems programming language from Mozilla. Crucially, it relies on the webdriver crate to provide the HTTPD and do most of the heavy lifting of marshalling the WebDriver protocol. geckodriver translates WebDriver commands, responses, and errors to the Marionette protocol, and acts as a proxy between WebDriver clients and Marionette.
Whilst geckodriver lives in the same source repository as Firefox and is built in the Firefox CI, is is not built if you build Firefox locally. To enable building of geckodriver locally, ensure you put this in your mozconfig:
ac_add_options --enable-geckodriver
When you have, you are ready to start off your first build:
% ./mach build testing/geckodriver
To run the executable from the objdir:
% ./mach geckodriver -- --version 0:00.27 /home/ato/src/gecko/obj-x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/dist/bin/geckodriver --version --binary /home/ato/src/gecko/obj-x86_64-pc-linux-gnu/dist/bin/firefox geckodriver 0.19.0 (f3e939a81ee1169f9501ad96eb43bbf4bf4a1bde 2017-10-11)
We verify and test geckodriver in a couple of different ways. Since it is an implementation of the WebDriver web standard, we share a set of conformance tests with other browser vendors through the Web Platform Tests (WPT) initiative. This lets us ensure web compatibility between different WebDriver implementations for different browsers.
In addition to the WPT tests, geckodriver and webdriver have unit tests. You can use a mach command to run them:
% ./mach test testing/geckodriver
The webdriver crate tests are unfortunately not yet runnable through mach.
Work to make this possible is tracked in [[https://bugzil.la/1424369]].
For the moment you must run them manually through cargo:
% cd testing/webdriver % cargo test
To run the more extensive WPT tests you can use mach, but first make sure you have a build of Firefox:
% ./mach build % ./mach wpt testing/web-platform/tests/webdriver
As these are functional integration tests and pop up Firefox windows sporadically, a helpful tip is to surpress the window whilst you are running them by using Firefox’ headless mode:
% MOZ_HEADLESS=1 ./mach wpt testing/web-platform/tests/webdriver
In addition to the MOZ_HEADLESS output variable there is also
MOZ_HEADLESS_WIDTH and MOZ_HEADLESS_HEIGHT to control the
dimensions of the no-op virtual display. This is similar to using
xvfb(1) which you may know from the X windowing system, but has
the additional benefit of also working on macOS and Windows.
As you get in to development of geckodriver and Marionette you will increasingly grow to understand our love for [trace-level logs]. They provide us with the input—the HTTP requests—from the client (in WPT’s case from the tests’ use of a custom WebDriver client), the translation geckodriver makes to the Marionette protocol, the log output from Marionette, its responses back to geckodriver, and finally the output—or the HTTP response—back to the client.
The [trace-level logs] can be surfaced by passing on the -vv
flag to geckodriver through WPT:
% ./mach wpt --webdriver-arg=-vv testing/web-platform/tests/webdriver
You can submit patches by uploading .diff files to Bugzilla or by sending them to MozReview.
Once you have contributed a couple of patches, we are happy to sponsor you in becoming a Mozilla committer. When you have been granted commit access level 1 you will have permission to use the Firefox CI to trigger your own “try runs” to test your changes.
The mailing list for geckodriver discussion is tools-marionette@lists.mozilla.org (subscribe, archive).
If you prefer real-time chat, there is often someone in the #ateam IRC channel on irc.mozilla.org. Don’t ask if you can ask a question, just ask, and please wait for an answer as we might not be in your timezone.