Install Robot Framework RIDE through homebrew

Python, wxPython and robotframework RIDE on your Mac OS X

Updated on Feb 23, 2016

Fixed wxPython installation so it works with most recent versions available today.

Updated on Jul 03, 2017

Seems this installation method no longer works on >= MacOS Sierra. Please use a docker image and Ride in browser.

wxPython

Since wxPython is available on homebrew you don’t have to install the package provided on the wxPython website.

$ brew info wxpython
wxPython: stable 3.0.2.0 (bottled)
Python bindings for wxWidgets
https://www.wxwidgets.org/
/usr/local/Cellar/wxPython/3.0.2.0 (1,107 files, 38.2M)
  Poured from bottle
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew/blob/master/Library/Formula/wxpython.rb
==> Dependencies
Required: wxmac ==> Options
--universal
$ brew install wxpython

This will take some time so be patient.

Robot Framework

Robot Framework is a generic test automation framework for acceptance testing and acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). It has easy-to-use tabular test data syntax and utilizes the keyword-driven testing approach.

For sure you have to define a lot of keywords, but if you setup your project templates in a keywords file once you’ll get quite readable test files, even for a non-developer.

Installing robotframework-ride and robotsuite is quite easy by using pip:

$ pip install robotframework-ride
Collecting robotsuite
Collecting robotframework-ride
Collecting robotframework>=2.8rc1 (from robotsuite)
Installing collected packages: robotframework, robotsuite, robotframework-ride
Successfully installed robotframework-3.0 robotframework-ride-1.5.2.1 robotsuite-1.7.0

Ride executable was installed in /usr/local/bin/ride.py. If you try to start RIDE now, you’ll get following error:

wxPython not found.
You need to install wxPython 2.8.12.1 with unicode support to run RIDE.
wxPython 2.8.12.1 can be downloaded from http://sourceforge.net/projects/wxpython/files/wxPython/2.8.12.1/

Patch robotframework-ride’s wx detection

Find your robotide python egg and open its __init__.py. On my machine this was located in /usr/local/lib/python2.7/site-packages/robotide.

You’ll have to update wxversion detection, so add following line:

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try:
    import wxversion
    from wxversion import VersionError
    if sys.platform == 'darwin': # CAN NOT IMPORT IS_MAC AS THERE IS A wx IMPORT
        supported_versions.append("2.9")
        supported_versions.append("3.0")
    wxversion.select(supported_versions)
    import wx

That’s it, now let’s start ride.py.

Starting RIDE

If you’ve added /usr/local/bin to you’re PATH environment variable you should be able to start ride by typing ride.py on your command line.:

$ ride.py
Creating librarykeywords database to "/Users/daniel/.robotframework/ride/librarykeywords.db"
../../_images/robotframework-ride.png

Problems

If you have any trouble in future, just delete the ~/.robotframework directory, and you can startup the application again.

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