Robotframework

From SME Server
Jump to navigation Jump to search

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

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

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':http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XPath

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

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