Robot Framework is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and it utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach. Its testing capabilities can be extended by test libraries implemented either with Python or Java, and users can create new higher-level keywords from existing ones using the same syntax that is used for creating test cases.

Robot Framework project is hosted on GitHub where you can find further documentation, source code, and issue tracker. Downloads are hosted at PyPI, except for standalone jar distribution that is in Maven central. The framework has a rich ecosystem around it consisting of various generic test libraries and tools that are developed as separate projects.

Robot Framework is operating system and application independent. The core framework is implemented using Python and runs also on Jython (JVM) and IronPython (.NET).

For more information about Robot Framework and the ecosystem, see http://robotframework.org.

If you already have Python with pip installed, you can simply run:

pip install robotframework

Otherwise see INSTALL.rst for detailed installation instructions. They cover also installing Python, Jython and IronPython.

Below is a simple example test case for testing login to some system. You can find more examples with links to demo projects from http://robotframework.org.

*** Settings ***
Documentation     A test suite with a single test for valid login.
...
...               This test has a workflow that is created using keywords in
...               the imported resource file.
Resource          resource.txt

*** Test Cases ***
Valid Login
    Open Browser To Login Page
    Input Username    demo
    Input Password    mode
    Submit Credentials
    Welcome Page Should Be Open
    [Teardown]    Close Browser

Robot Framework is executed from the command line using pybot, jybot or ipybot scripts, depending is it run on Python, Jython or IronPython. The basic usage is giving a path to a test case file or directory as an argument with possible command line options before the path. Additionally there is rebot tool for post-processing outputs:

pybot tests.txt
jybot --variable HOST:example.com --outputdir results path/to/tests/
rebot --name Example output1.xml output2.xml

Run pybot --help and rebot --help for more information about the command line usage. For a complete reference manual see Robot Framewrk User Guide.

Robot Framework code is provided under Apache License 2.0 Documentation and other similar content use Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. Most libraries and tools in the ecosystem are also open source, but they may use different licenses.