RobotLab

Building the Robots from Jupyter Workshop Installer

Build It

Get Miniconda. Install anaconda-project.

On OSX/Linux, run:

anaconda-project run build
anaconda-project run test

On Windows, run:

anaconda-project run build:win
anaconda-project run test:win

Motivation

While Robot Framework has no dependencies beyond the Python standard library, using it for non-trivial testing or process automation usually requires a fair amount of additional Python dependencies, and even some more exotic ones.

The focus of this workshop, running Robot tests and tasks interactively with robotkernel, requires the Jupyter stack, and to demonstrate some of its more advanced features, some fairly extensive extra libraries from both the Robot Framework and the scientific Python ecosystems.

To make a three-hour workshop reasonable, this repo uses conda and constructor to build single-file installers for multiple platforms, reducing the per-participant install time to a minimum, and make sneaker-net distribution possible in the event that network problems arise.

conda packaging

Once it has matured, robotkernel will be available from conda-forge, the community-driven upstream of the Anaconda Distribution.

So for these installers, and supporting exmaples, we build a number of dependencies.

robotlab

JupyterLab's build chain has some negative externalities for end users, namely an install- or run-time dependency on NodeJS and npmjs.org when using any labextensions other than the built-in set (e.g. Notebook, Terminal, Console, Editor, etc.). Because, for the purposes of the workshop, we want to get to the Good Stuff of running Robot notebooks and not spend a bunch of time debugging nodejs and webpack, we've added a few choice JupyterLab extensions:

• jupyterlab_robotmode: syntax highlighting for Robot Framework
• @jupyterlab/toc: a table of contents pane for Markdown headers
• @jupyter-widgets/jupyterlab-manager: because widgets are always good

...and wrapped them into a conda package which exposes some command, which can do most of the things jupyter lab can do.

robotlab works like jupyter lab, while robotlab-extension works like jupyter labextension. This isn't a toy installation: with the bundled nodejs, an intrepid user can still install any of the labextensions that are compatible with the version robotlab was built with: as of writing, 1.1.x.

constructor

All of the dependencies are captured in construct.yaml.in. In addition to everything mentioned above, you'll also find:

In addition to required dependencies a number of extra libraries are included to showcase some of the features of using Robot Framework interactively.

• JupyterLibrary for testing Jupyter clients with robotframework
  • SeleniumLibrary for controlling browsers
    • geckodriver for interacting with Mozilla Firefox 57+
• opencv for image-driven testing
• robotframework-lint for helping you write clean robot syntax
• RESTInstance for testing REST APIs, including swagger

On Browsers and WebDrivers

RobotLab includes Mozilla Firefox and geckodriver, with versions that will be supported for years, not months, by a team that is committed to open source and web standards.

webdriver for Microsoft Internet Explorer

It's pretty easy to get webdriver for Microsoft Edge, but...

• it but can't be redistributed
• it has to match the version of Edge/Explorer exactly

chromedriver for Google Chrome

It's also pretty easy to get chromedriver for Google Chrome, but...

• it has to match the version of Chrome exactly