Installation Instructions

Installation Instructions

• Preconditions
  • Python
  • wxPython
  • Robot Framework
• Installation
  • Installing from source
  • Using Windows installer
  • Using pip or easy_install
• Start-up
• Using latest development version

Preconditions

Python

RIDE runs only on the regular Python, not on Jython nor IronPython. Python 2.6 is the minimum version. Notice that similarly as Robot Framework, RIDE does not yet support Python 3. Notice also that on OS X RIDE requires 32-bit Python version.

Most other operating systems than Windows have a recent enough Python installed by default. You can find Windows installers and plenty of other information from http://python.org.

wxPython

RIDE's GUI is implemented using wxPython toolkit. Only wxPython 2.8.12.1 with Unicode support is officially supported. Possible new releases in wxPython 2.8 series ought to work fine too. wxPython 3.0 support is one of the priorities for future development.

On Windows you can download an appropriate installer from wxPython download page. For more information about the installation see http://wxpython.org pages in general.

On Linux you should be able to install wxPython with your package manager. For example, on Debian based systems such as Ubuntu running sudo apt-get install python-wxgtk2.8 ought to be enough.

On OS X you should use wxPython binaries found from the wxPython download page.

Robot Framework

If RIDE is used only to edit test cases, Robot Framework does not need to installed at all. However, the Test runner plugin requires Robot Framework to be separately installed.

Note

Directories added to PATH as part of the Robot Framework installation must not contain quotes. Otherwise RIDE may not be able to execute tests due to a bug in Python.

Installation

RIDE is distributed as separate installation packages for Windows and for other platforms, and these packages can be found from the download page.

Installing from source

• Get the source distribution.
• Extract it e.g. with WinZip on Windows or with tar xzvf robotframework-ride-<version>.tar.gz on Linux or OS X.
• Go to the created directory and run python setup.py install. Notice that on Linux or OS X you typically need to prefix the command with sudo.

Using Windows installer

• Get Windows installer.
• Double click the installer and click through the opened GUI.

Using pip or easy_install

RIDE can also be installed with pip or easy_install using either of these commands:

pip install robotframework-ride
easy_install robotframework-ride

This installation approach works on all operating systems but obviously requires you to have pip or easy_install installed. Notice that you may need to prefix the above commands with sudo on unixy machines.

Start-up

After a successful installation RIDE can be started from the command line by running ride.py. Alternatively you can specify a file or directory to open as an argument like ride.py path/to/tests. Starting from RIDE 0.54, you can also create a desktop shortcut during installation on Windows.

On Windows running ride.py requires having <PythonInstallationDir>\Scripts on PATH. If pybot command to run tests with Robot Framework works you should be fine. If it does not, see Robot Framework installation instructions for more information about setting PATH.

If you use Cygwin on Windows, you may need to fix the shebang line in ride.py manually before running it.

Using latest development version

To test the latest enhancements or fixes, you can easily checkout the latest RIDE sources from its version control system and run it directly from there. As a precondition you need to have Git and Paver installed. After that, just run the following commands to clone RIDE's repository and start the latest version:

git clone https://github.com/robotframework/RIDE.git
cd RIDE
paver run [datasource]

To update your clone, run git pull in the RIDE directory.