How to setup Robot Framework

2 min readJan 18, 2017

Robot framework is a popular automation framework to use for acceptance test. Using the same syntax, it can run on any OS — In this tutorial, I will be using Mac.

The groundwork

First is to make sure you have pip, virtualenv and virtualenvwrapper install on your machine.

use this to select the environment to work on

workon

Because Python may get a little silly when we install many conflicting packages, it is a good practice to create virtual environment before we start working on that.

Once you are in the Virtual Environment — go ahead and install robot and selenium.

pip install robotframework
pip install robotframework-selenium2library

Notice that I am now in a “Robotsandbox” virtualEnv

Congrads, now you have Robot running on your machine !!!

If you have not already, it is a good idea to visit Robot Github page

robotframework/robotframework

robotframework - Generic test automation framework.

github.com

Setting Web Driver

Firefox should work out of the box.

Safari is relatively easy to setup.

From Preference > Advance > Show developer in menu bar > Allow Remote Automation

For Chrome, it is a little harder. First go to

https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/downloads

to get the chromedriver and place it in this path

/usr/local/bin/chromedriver

Simple Hello Google

Write a simple robot file. The Goal is to just open google.

***setting***
Library         Selenium2Library***Test case***
Open Google
        Open Google*** Variables ***
#01Welcome Page
${URLwelcome}           https://www.google.com
${BROWSER}              chrome***Keyword***
Open Google
        Open Browser            ${URLwelcome}    ${BROWSER}

You should now see a google page

This should be enough to get you up and running.

If you want to learn more about robot framework and selenium http://robotframework.org/ is a good place to start

Have fun

— Pondd —