Pyramid testing with RobotFramework

So finally, Pyramid got its Robot.

This is a convenience package to enable Robot Framework tests in Pyramid. Robot Framework is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD) arround Selenium2. It puts all together Asko Soukka's robotsuite that enables seamless integration of Robotframework with unittest and WebTest HTTP client/server utilities.

As robotsuite works with a plone.testing layer, we need to setup one in the test boilerplate. This is because robotsuite was originally designed to work with Plone testing framework, however we've completelly detached from it by including a mean to create a testing layer as robotsuite expects.

Just setup your tests boilerplate like:

import os
import robotsuite
import unittest
from webtest import http
from paste.deploy import loadapp

from pyramid_robot.layer import Layer, layered


class myPyramidLayer(Layer):

    defaultBases = ()

    def setUp(self):
        conf_dir = os.path.dirname(__file__)
        app = loadapp('config:test.ini', relative_to=conf_dir)
        self.server = http.StopableWSGIServer.create(app, port=8080)

    def tearDown(self):
        self.server.shutdown()

PYRAMIDROBOTLAYER = myPyramidLayer()

You should provide a valid paste deploy .ini file for initialize your app under test. This can be similar to the one you use to run your app, customized for your testing needs. The boilerplate looks for this file in the test folder. Then we will create a server listening to the specified port. See WebTest documentation for additional customization.

Then we define our test suite like:

def test_suite():
    suite = unittest.TestSuite()
    current_dir = os.path.abspath(os.path.dirname(__file__))
    robot_dir = os.path.join(current_dir, 'robot')
    robot_tests = [
        os.path.join('robot', doc) for doc in
        os.listdir(robot_dir) if doc.endswith('.robot') and
        doc.startswith('test_')
    ]
    for test in robot_tests:
        suite.addTests([
            layered(robotsuite.RobotTestSuite(test),
            layer=PYRAMIDROBOTLAYER),
        ])
    return suite

This will prepare the suite and will search for any file with the extension .robot inside the robot folder inside the test folder.

Examples

You can find a very simple test app, a fixture and a sample robot test in the test folder.

Drawbacks

Call it a drawback, I call it a feature ;)

You can only run the tests using zope.testing.testrunner, otherwise they will get ignored. I think it would be also be possible to use other test runner like nose, contributions are welcomed.

You can setup easily a zc.buildout enviroment with the zope.testing.testrunner like the one included in the root package. Just do:

$ python bootstrap.py
$ ./bin/buildout

and then, to be able to run the example tests:

$ ./bin/test

Documentation

See RobotFramework documentation for resources on how to use it:

http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/

http://code.google.com/p/robotframework/wiki/HowToWriteGoodTestCases

http://robotframework.googlecode.com/hg/doc/userguide/RobotFrameworkUserGuide.html?r=2.7.6

http://robotframework.googlecode.com/hg/doc/libraries/BuiltIn.html?r=2.7.6

http://rtomac.github.com/robotframework-selenium2library/doc/Selenium2Library.html