example7.md

Example 7: Run RobotFramework inside a docker container

In general it is quite easy to deploy RobotFramework and additional libaries to different environments. You can use pip or prepare complete runtime environments which just get installed/copied when needed.

Another possibility is to run RobotFramework inside a docker container.

For this example we will use a different vagrant box than for the other examples. See subfolder vagrant. The difference here is that we do not install RobotFramework using vagrant.

To check if docker is installed correctly, just run:

sudo docker run hello-world

Ok now we can do some steps to create our own container where we just pass our robot file to run.

First content of our Dockerfile will be:

FROM python:3

RUN python3 -m pip install robotframework

This will use python:3 and install RobotFramework.

Hint: To change the python version inside the container, just adapt the tag in the first line. Let's say you want to use Python 3.6, just write
FROM python:3.6
To see all available tags, go to dockerhub python.

Build the container:

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync/docker$ sudo docker build -t output/robot-docker .

And run it:

docker run --name test -ti output/robot-docker bash

This will open a bash inside your container. You can run root@5eb451dcacbf:/# python3 -m robot --help to test this.

Since we started the container interactively, to leave we have to use Strg + d

Outside of the container you can check that the robot command will not work:

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync/docker$ python3 -m robot --help
/usr/bin/python3: No module named robot

Remove the container:

sudo docker rm /test

Now, run it directly in the background by starting it in detached mode with -d.

sudo docker run -d --name test -ti output/robot-docker

And by running the following command this will print the RobotFramework help:

sudo docker exec test sh -c "python3 -m robot --help"

Stop and remove the container:

sudo docker stop /test
sudo docker rm /test

Now we add ENTRYPOINT ["python3", "-m", "robot"] to our Dockerfile.

Rebuild the container again:

sudo docker build -t output/robot-docker .

And run it to print the help:

sudo docker run -ti output/robot-docker --help

And now we can just run our robot file with the container:

sudo docker run -v `pwd`:`pwd` -w `pwd` -ti output/robot-docker example7.robot

Take care of your current working directory on the host. Else you will see:

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync/docker$ sudo docker run -v `pwd`:`pwd` -w `pwd` -ti output/robot-docker example7.robot
[ ERROR ] Parsing 'example7.robot' failed: Data source does not exist.

Try --help for usage information.

So change the directory to /vagrantsync and run the container their since our robot file is located here.

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync$ ls
docker  example7.robot  provision.sh  Vagrantfile

Since we mounted the currend working directory, we already get the logs:

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync$ sudo docker run -v `pwd`:`pwd` -w `pwd` -ti output/robot-docker example7.robot
==============================================================================
Example7                                                                      
==============================================================================
Good Example                                                          | PASS |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Example7                                                              | PASS |
1 critical test, 1 passed, 0 failed
1 test total, 1 passed, 0 failed
==============================================================================
Output:  /vagrantsync/output.xml
Log:     /vagrantsync/log.html
Report:  /vagrantsync/report.html
vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync$ ls
docker  example7.robot  log.html  output.xml  provision.sh  report.html  Vagrantfile

But we can just pass more arguments to RobotFramework to save the log files in a better way:

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync$ sudo docker run -v `pwd`:`pwd` -w `pwd` -ti output/robot-docker --outputdir logs/7 example7.robot
==============================================================================
Example7                                                                      
==============================================================================
Good Example                                                          | PASS |
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Example7                                                              | PASS |
1 critical test, 1 passed, 0 failed
1 test total, 1 passed, 0 failed
==============================================================================
Output:  /vagrantsync/logs/7/output.xml
Log:     /vagrantsync/logs/7/log.html
Report:  /vagrantsync/logs/7/report.html

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync$ ls
docker  example7.robot  log.html  logs  output.xml  provision.sh  report.html  Vagrantfile

vagrant@linux:/vagrantsync$ ls logs/7/
log.html  output.xml  report.html