Installing Robot Framework

Robot Framework is a popular open source tool for doing RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to automate repetive tasks. This article is an installation guide.

Kalle Tolonen
6.7.2022

Requirements

1. Debian 11
2. Python (Comes pre-installed on Debian)

Creating a virtual environment

First you should install pip packages in a virtual env to contain them. You can install Virtualenv with:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y virtualenv

After the pkg has been installed, you should create a top folder for your projects and create an environment there.

mkdir robot_framework
virtualenv env/ -p python3 --system-site-packages

The latter command creates a virtual environment for Python and makes it possible for Python to use system-site-packages. That way you can use pkg’s that aren’t installed in the environment on top of those that you’ll install.

After that we can create requirements.txt for our project and install the pkg’s.

#requirements.txt

robotframework

source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

To verify our installation, we can check for the version.

robot --version

The printout proves that we have successfully installed the pkg.

Robot Framework 5.0.1 (Python 3.9.2 on linux)