Running Selenium geckodriver without generating geckodriver log files

Question

I have some Robot Framework test suites that use the SeleniumLibrary. I run these tests with Firefox and geckodriver. Whenever I run my tests suites, a geckodriver-*.log file is created.

For example, before I run my test suite, I have only my .robot file:

$ ls
example.robot

I then run robot, and the geckodriver log file is generated:

$ robot --output NONE --log NONE --report NONE example.robot 
<output of running test suite>
$ ls
example.robot  geckodriver-1.log

If I rerun the test suite, a geckodriver-2.log file is created, and running the suite a third time generates a geckodriver-3.log file, and so on.

How can I run my test suites without any geckodriver log files being created?

I know this must be possible, since it can be done in regular python (without Robot) by setting the service_log_path to /dev/null, as below:

from selenium import webdriver
import shutil

driver = webdriver.Firefox(
    executable_path=shutil.which('geckodriver'),
    service_log_path='/dev/null'
)
driver.get('https://stackoverflow.com/')
driver.quit()

My *.robot file for a minimal reproducible example

*** Settings ***
Library     SeleniumLibrary    run_on_failure=None

*** Test Cases ***
Example Test Case
    Open Browser    https://stackoverflow.com/    Firefox
    Close Browser

Version and OS information

Operating system: Linux
Firefox: 79.0
geckodriver: 0.26.0
Python: 3.6.9
Robot Framework: 3.2.2
robotframework-seleniumlibrary: 4.4.0

Of course I can delete the files afterwards, but I would prefer they simply weren't created in the first place. I am running these tests on a computer with an SSD, and I don't want to be wasting writes that I don't need. But even if using writes is not a concern, from a curiosity standpoint I would like to know how to prevent the creation of these files. — Shane Bishop

Shane Bishop Shane Bishop · Accepted Answer · 2021-01-03T20:15:27

The solution is to set the service_log_path argument for the Open Browser keyword to os.path.devnull, as below:

*** Settings ***
Library     SeleniumLibrary    run_on_failure=None

*** Test Cases ***
Example Test Case
    Open Browser    https://stackoverflow.com/    Firefox    service_log_path=${{os.path.devnull}}
    Close Browser

Then geckodriver will log to os.path.devnull instead of to a file in the current working directory.

Note: This example uses inline python evaluation, a new feature in Robot Framework 3.2.

Running Selenium geckodriver without generating geckodriver log files

1 Answers