Robotframework

Robotframework

Page documenting the setup and possible The use of robotframework for regression testing of SMEServer.

Page Initial creation by Brian J Read - 3rd March 2014

Installation

Initial installation is on the back of a Centos 6.5 (64 bit in my case) install. I use Virtual Box under Linux Mint 16.

1. Install Centos 6.5
2. login as root
3. Install robotframework:

yum install make automake gcc gcc-c++ kernel-devel git-core –y
yum install python-devel -y
curl -o /tmp/ezsetup.py https://sources.rhodecode.com/setuptools/raw/bootstrap/ez_setup.py
python /tmp/ezsetup.py
/usr/bin/easy_install pip
rm setuptools-*.tar.gz
pip install -i https://pypi.rhodecode.com/ --upgrade pip
pip install robotframework
pip install virtualenv

Install additional robot framework libraries:

pip install robotframework-selenium2library
pip install robotframework-ftplibrary
pip install robotframework-sshlibrary

You can check if the SSH library installed successfully with:

python -c "import SSHLibrary"

If you find you have problems with the SSH library, reinstalling the support libraries for the SSH library through yum might help:

sudo pip uninstall pycrypto
sudo yum erase python-crypto
sudo yum clean all
sudo yum install python-crypto
sudo yum install python-paramiko

Note that selenium needs a browser to drive, so you'll need to install a graphical GUI, you can do this by:

yum -y groupinstall "Desktop" "Desktop Platform" "X Window System" "Fonts"
yum -y groupinstall "Graphical Administration Tools"
yum -y groupinstall "Internet Browser"
yum -y groupinstall "General Purpose Desktop"

If you want to start it up automatically, then instructions are here

else just type:

startx

After command line logging in.

You also ought to create a user to run under - you can use the graphical admin user prgram from the above, and then login as that.

Robotframework Demos

There are ssh, ftp and web (selenium) demos at:

http://robotframework.googlecode.com/hg/doc/userguide/RobotFrameworkUserGuide.html?r=2.8.4#demonstrations

https://bitbucket.org/robotframework/webdemo/wiki/Home#rst-header-starting-demo-application

https://robotframework-sshlibrary.googlecode.com/git-history/2.0/doc/SSHLibrary.html

http://sourceforge.net/projects/rf-ftp-py/files/1.2/FtpLibraryExample.txt/download

SME Server Test Automation on GitHub

The git repository with an intial set of tests for SME Server is now on GitHub here:

https://github.com/MarcoHess/smeserver-test-automation

Loading and Trying it

The best way to try these tests is to clone the repository from GitHub with:

git clone https://github.com/MarcoHess/smeserver-test-automation.git

Alternatively you can also download a ZIP file with the whole repository with this link:

https://github.com/MarcoHess/smeserver-test-automation/archive/master.zip

Setting up the tests

The "resource.robot" file in the top "sme" directory contains a number of variables and macros that are used by the test scripts.

The key ones that you need to change are:

${SERVER NAME}       sme9-64
${SERVER DOMAIN}     through-ip.com
${VALID PASSWORD}    Admin-Test-1234

Note that the URL must be same as the FQDN for the server, as it uses this as a test on the title of the logged server manager web page.

The tests assume that the ${SERVER NAME}.${SERVER DOMAIN} resolve to the correct IP of that server. I typically setup entries for test servers with a host name entry on my main server.

Running the tests

The tests are setup in an hierarchical fashion. To run all tests:

pybot sme

To run a subset of the tests use:

pybot sme/02__server-manager

or for the ftp tests:

pybot sme/03__remote_access/02__ftp/

and ssh by

pybot sme/03__remote_access/03__ssh/

Contributing Tests

With the main test repository on GitHub it is very easy to 'fork' a copy of the repository, start adding, fixing or modifying tests and then send a 'Pull Request' to merge your updates into the main repository.

Here is an outline of that process: https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo

Additional Tools

There are a number of tools that are useful in developing tests. This section lists a number of these:

RIDE IDE

The Robotframework has its own IDE called RIDE. It is particularly useful for running individual tests during development. More info here https://github.com/robotframework/RIDE/wiki . It be easily installed with:

pip install robotframework-ride

and then run RIDE with:

 ride.py sme

XPath Checker Firefox Plugin

It sometimes is quite tricky to locate the right element in a web page to check or click. One method that selenium supports is XPaths.

In order to develop these, I found the Firefox plugin 'XPaths Checker' particularly useful.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xpath-checker/