Robot Framework

Note

This repository is currently under migration from Google Code. Code and issues have already been moved, but it will take some tim before old wiki pages are migrated.

Introduction

Robot Framework is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.

Robot Framework is operating system and application independent. The core framework is implemented using Python and runs also on Jython (JVM) and IronPython (.NET). The framework has a rich ecosystem around it consisting of various generic test libraries and tools that are developed as separate projects. For more information about Robot Framework and the ecosystem, see http://robotframework.org.

Robot Framework project is hosted on GitHub where you can find source code, an issue tracker, and some further documentation. Downloads are hosted at PyPI, except for the standalone jar distribution that is in Maven central.

Installation

If you already have Python with pip installed, you can simply run:

pip install robotframework

Alternatively you can get Robot Framework source code by downloading the source distribution from PyPI or cloning the project from GitHub. After that you can install the framework with:

python setup.py install

For more detailed installation instructions, including installing Python, Jython and IronPython, see INSTALL.rst.

Example

Below is a simple example test case for testing login to some system. You can find more examples with links to related demo projects from http://robotframework.org.

*** Settings ***
Documentation     A test suite with a single test for valid login.
...
...               This test has a workflow that is created using keywords in
...               the imported resource file.
Resource          resource.txt

*** Test Cases ***
Valid Login
    Open Browser To Login Page
    Input Username    demo
    Input Password    mode
    Submit Credentials
    Welcome Page Should Be Open
    [Teardown]    Close Browser

Usage

Robot Framework is executed from the command line using pybot, jybot or ipybot scripts, depending is it run on Python, Jython or IronPython. The basic usage is giving a path to a test case file or directory as an argument with possible command line options before the path. Additionally there is rebot tool for combining results and otherwise post-processing outputs:

pybot tests.txt
jybot --variable HOST:example.com --outputdir results path/to/tests/
rebot --name Example output1.xml output2.xml

Run pybot --help and rebot --help for more information about the command line usage. For a complete reference manual see Robot Framework User Guide.

License

Robot Framework code is provided under Apache License 2.0. Documentation and other similar content use Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Most libraries and tools in the ecosystem are also open source, but they may use different licenses.