Installing Robot Framework IDE (RIDE)

1. Introduction

1.1 Robot Framework

Robot Framework is an automated functional testing framework written in Python.

It is highly extensible and supports keyword-driven testing
It can test several types of clients or interfaces at the same time
It can run distributed tests

It is mainly used for acceptance testing with many rounds and for test-driven development.

1.2 Robot Framework IDE (RIDE)

Robot Framework IDE (RIDE) is the integrated development environment for the Robot Framework.

It is worth noting that, from March 12, 2016 to the present, robotframework/RIDE has had no new commits. Of course, you can try other fork versions, such as HelioGuilherme66/RIDE.

2. Installing Dependencies

Install the Python environment

Since robotframework-ride (1.5.2.1) does not support Python 3, it is recommended to use Python 2.7. Do not forget to add the Python installation path to PATH, set path=%path%;c:\python27;c:\python27\Scripts (assuming the installation directory is c:\python27).
Go to download

Install robot framework

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pip install robotframework

Install robot framework ride

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pip install robotframework-ride

Install the necessary libraries

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pip install robotframework-selenium2library
pip install robotframework-archivelibrary
pip install robotframework-SSHLibrary
pip install robotframework-ftplibrary
pip install robotframework-excellibrary

Install wxPython

wxPython is a cross-platform, open-source GUI toolkit implemented as a Python extension module that wraps wxWidgets.

Different versions of robotframework may depend on different versions of wxPython.

It is recommended that you first run the ride.py command in the console.

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ride.py
wxPython not found.
You need to install wxPython 2.8.12.1 with unicode support to run RIDE.
wxPython 2.8.12.1 can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/wxpython/files/wxPython/2.8.12.1/

Because wxPython is not installed, the terminal reports an error showing the wxPython version that the current robotframework requires.

Besides the version number, you also need to install a version matching the bitness of Python, 32-bit or 64-bit.

Use the following command to quickly determine whether the current Python version is 32-bit or 64-bit.

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ipython
>>> import platform
>>> platform.architecture()
('32bit', 'WindowsPE')

Then go to the wxPython website or sourceforge to download the unicode version with the appropriate version number and bitness (32-bit or 64-bit), and install it to \python\Lib\site-packages.

Since installing with pip without a version number installs the latest version, what follows are my local version numbers for reference:

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pip list
robotframework (3.0.4)
robotframework-archivelibrary (0.4.0)
robotframework-ftplibrary (1.6)
robotframework-ride (1.5.2.1)
robotframework-selenium2library (3.0.0)
robotframework-seleniumlibrary (3.1.1)
robotframework-sshlibrary (3.1.0)
robotframework-excellibrary(0.0.2)

3. Running

In any terminal, type ride.py and the RIDE interface appears.

If the above startup method reports an error, you can try going into the directory containing ride.py, python\scripts, and running python ride.py.

4. Problems and Solutions

4.1 ‘ascii’ codec can’t decode byte 0xd7

Error message:

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Unexpected error: UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xd7 in position 69: ordinal not in range(128)

Solution:

Create a sitecustomize.py file in the Lib folder of the Python installation directory. Its contents are as follows:

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import sys
reload(sys)
sys.setdefaultencoding('gbk') # Windows 下

The default system encoding of Python is ASCII, which means Chinese paths cannot be recognized, so the default encoding must be changed to gbk (Windows) or utf8 (Linux).

4.2 python cannot found robot

robotframework depends on the robot package. However, if you installed robot before, the robotframework configuration will be wrong and robot cannot be found.

The recommended fix is to delete every package starting with robot under the python\Lib\site-packages directory, then reinstall once. This is simpler and more straightforward.

4.3 WebDriverException

Error message:

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WebDriverException: Message: 'chromedriver' executable needs to be in PATH. Please see https://sites.google.com/a/chromium.org/chromedriver/home

Solution:

This is usually caused by a driver version that does not match the browser version, or by the driver not being found.

Go to the address given in the message, or to the Selenium driver list page, download the driver matching your local browser version, and add the driver to the PATH environment variable.