Modify timeout value when opening a remote webdriver? - selenium-webdriver

Question

We're using a 3rd party provider to run some our Selenium tests against browsers and devices we don't have here. One of these is an iPad.
Currently we open/instantiate the webdriver with this code in Ruby:
driver = Selenium::WebDriver.for(:remote, :url => url, :desired_capabilities => capabilities)
that works great when running against this 3rd party service if we're firing up instances of Chrome or FireFox. For iOS however they spin up a virtual machine with an iOS simulator, and very often the call above will timeout before the sim's browser is ready. They have acknowledged their VM startup times could be better.
But it is what it is. As far as practical next steps are concerned is there a way I can customize the timeout value when creating the remote webdriver?

Answer 1

What is the third party you are using? Is it by chance SauceLabs?
I'm not sure if this will work universally but you should be able to set timeout configurations on the desired capability object. Here's some sample code from my test project in java:
/**
* Sets the default capabilities for the RemoteWebDriver we use for SauceLabs
*
* #param capabilities the capabilities to set defaults to
* #return the DesiredCapabilities object after setting the default values
*/
private static DesiredCapabilities setDefaultCapabilities(DesiredCapabilities capabilities)
{
// Set job some defaults
capabilities.setCapability("max-duration", DEFAULT_TEST_TIMEOUT);
capabilities.setCapability("command-timeout", DEFAULT_COMMAND_TIMEOUT);
capabilities.setCapability("idle-timeout", DEFAULT_IDLE_TIMEOUT);
capabilities.setCapability("selenium-version", DEFAULT_SELENIUM_VERSION);
// Additional settings to help debugging and improve job perf
capabilities.setCapability("public", "share");
capabilities.setCapability("webdriver.remote.quietExceptions", false);
capabilities.setCapability("capture-html", true);
capabilities.setCapability("video-upload-on-pass", false);
return capabilities;
}
Here's the SauceLabs documentation for the capabilities: https://docs.saucelabs.com/reference/test-configuration/