Preparing your system to run Python and Robot Framework

This repo uses poetry for Python environment isolation and package management. Before poetry can be installed, Python must be installed. The minimum version to be installed can be found in the pyproject.toml file. For this workshop Python 3.10 or 3.11 is required. The appropriate download for your OS can be found here.

After installing Python, poetry can be installed. For OSX/ Linux / bashonwindows the command is:

curl -sSL https://install.python-poetry.org | python3 -

For Windows the PowerShell command is:

(Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://install.python-poetry.org -UseBasicParsing).Content | py -

To ensure the install succeeded, you can open a new shell and run

poetry --version

Windows users: if this does not work, see https://python-poetry.org/docs/#installing-with-the-official-installer point 3

Next poetry can be configured to create virtual environments for repos within the repo (this makes it easy to locate the .venv for a given repo if you want to clean / delete it):

poetry config virtualenvs.in-project true

Installing Visual Studio Code and suggested extensions

For this workshop, we'll be using Visual Studio Code as our IDE. The appropriate download for your OS can be found here. If you have not yet cloned this repo, you can do so from within VS Code as detailed e.g. here.

After opening the cloned repo in VS Code, a popup should appear in the lower-right corner informing you that this repo has recommended extension that can be installed. Please do so.

Example launch and setting files are also included in the .vscode folder. You can simply copy them and strip the .example part of the same to take them into use.

Running the API server using poetry and invoke

Now that the IDE and poetry are set up, the project's Python dependencies can be installed. With the repo opened in VS Code, open a terminal and execute:

poetry install

This should install all project dependencies. VS Code may inform you that a new virtual environment is detected and ask if you want to use it (yes).

In addition to poetry, the invoke package is used to create tasks that can be ran on all platforms in the same manner. These tasks are defined in the tasks.py file in the root of the repo. To see which tasks are available, run

poetry run inv --list

If the .venv is activated in the current shell, this can be shortened to inv --list

Further information / documentation of the tasks (if available) can be shown using

poetry run inv --help <task_name>

To start the API server used for the workshop, simply run

poetry run inv start-api

Once the API server has started, you can connect to the Swagger UI at http://127.0.0.1:8000/docs#/