Introducing RobotLab

Say hello to RobotLab! JupyterLab powered interactive Robot Framework test suite and RPA task suite authoring platform for Windows, MacOS and Linux. Provided for you by the Robots from Jupyter team. Welcome to the era of Robot Framework authoring with fast, fun, and more interactive iterations:

”The biggest criticism against Robot Framework is that it usually requires a complicated installing process.– –After trying up few different setups of Robot Framework combined with variety of GUI (graphical user interface) tools it turned out that there was a much easier way to do it. By installing Robotlab– –the user can really focus on the testing part and not a complicated set up.” 1

Our freely downloadable installers may look big, but they come with everything to get started, and they do not require Internet connection during install. For any issues with the installers, please, file an issue.

RobotLab for Linux and MacOS ship with everything required to get started in Robot Framework powered Selenium testing. RobotLab for Windows does not stop there, but also includes RobotFramework WhiteLibrary for Windows application testing and automation. Ever seen a Windows automation experience like this? Maybe a bit geeky, but efficient:

Background

In January 2018, the first Robot Framework conference was held in Helsinki, Finland. I wanted a fun topic for the sprints after the conference and started learning IPython kernel development. The very first version of RobotKernel, my Robot Framework IPython kernel for Jupyter integration, was working already before the end of the sprints:

Later in 2018, while I was too focused on other projects, Nicholas Bollweg found my RobotKernel and rebuilt its ideas and more into irobotframework Jupyter kernel for his employer. Once I learned from Nick about all the low hanging fruits I missed and the new features in JupyterLab, I couldn’t resist returning to work on RobotKernel.

Eventually, we decided to work together and propose a presentation and a workshop for the next RoboCon, in January 2019. Plan for the workshop, however, raised a question: How do we ensure that each participant of the workshop will have a working environment right from the start? Nick decided to solve that issue by building a standalone installer on top the shoulders of Conda.

That installer become RobotLab. And now you can have it too.