Make your Robot tests go Phantom

A new version of robotframework-selenium2library has just been released, and it (>= 1.2.0) comes with full support for PhantomJS, the famous headless WebKit browser. Thanks a lot to Jeremy for cutting that release and GhostDriver-project for the actual WebDriver-driver for PhantomJS.

To make the story short:

1. Download PhantomJS (>= 1.8.0), unpack it and place the phantomjs-binary somehere on your path so that it can be located by the Selenium bindings for Python.
2. Update your Selenium-packages (for Plone, update version pins and do the buildout). You’ll need at least Selenium >= 2.28.0 and robotframework-selenium2library >=1.2.0.
3. Execute your tests so that the Open Browser-keyword of Selenium2Library will be called with a named argument browser=phantomjs. See also the keyword documentation.

With plone.app.robotframework (tutorial) and a buildout environment, you can do part 3. simply with

$ bin/robot -v BROWSER:phantomjs ...

when you are running tests against bin/robot-server as recommended while writing your tests.

Or

$ ROBOT_BROWSER=phantomjs bin/test -t ...

when you are running test with zope.testrunner as recommended with a CI setup.