This document describes the public API of Robot Framework. Installation, basic usage and wealth of other topics are covered in Robot Framework User Guide.
Main API entry points are documented here, but the lower level implementation details are not that well documented. If the documentation is insufficient, it is possible to view the source code by clicking [source] link in the documentation. In case viewing the source is not helpful either, questions may be sent to the users mailing list.
Command line entry points are implemented as Python modules and they also provide programmatic APIs. Following entry points exist:
- robot.run entry point for executing tests.
- robot.rebot entry point for post-processing outputs.
- robot.libdoc entry point for the libdoc tool.
- robot.testdoc entry point for the testdoc tool.
- robot.tidy entry point for the tidy tool.
The Robot Framework Jar distribution contains also a Java API, in the form of the org.robotframework.RobotFramework class.
This package exposes the public APIs of Robot Framework.
Unless stated otherwise, the APIs exposed in this module are considered stable, and thus safe to use when building external tools on top of Robot Framework.
Currently exposed APIs are:
- logger for test libraries’ logging purposes.
- ExecutionResult() for reading execution results from XML output files.
- TestCaseFile, TestDataDirectory, and ResourceFile for parsing data files. In addition, a convenience factory function TestData() creates either TestCaseFile or TestDataDirectory based on the input.
- TestSuite() for creating a test suite that can be executed. This API is going to change in Robot Framework 2.8.
These names can be imported like this:
from robot.api import <name>
See documentations of the individual APIs for more details.
All robot packages are listed below. Typically you should not need to import anything from them directly, but the above public APIs may return objects implemented in them.