Wednesday, November 2, 2016

Installing Robot Framework on a MacBook

I recently faced challenges getting the open source Robot Framework to work on my MacBook, which is running OS X El Capitan. In general, the installation process should be trivial, but here's what finally worked:

  1. If you have the brew package manager installed, update it:

        brew update
  2. Use brew to install (or upgrade) the chromedriver program:

      brew upgrade chromedriver
  3. Make and use a Python virtualenv for the framework installation:

      pip install --upgrade virtualenv
      source virtualenvwrapper.sh  # Note: Depends on where virtualenvwrapper.sh was installed to.
      mkvirtualenv robotframework
      workon robotframework
      cdvirtualenv
  4. Install the necessary framework packages:

      pip install --upgrade robotframework
      pip install --upgrade robotframework-selenium2library
      pip install --upgrade requests
Now, you'll be able to use the robot command to run test scripts OK :-)