I’ve been working on a new project lately, called Robot Framework Hub. It’s a lame name, I know. Suggest a better name and maybe I’ll use it!

The project is now to the point where it’s ready to be used by more people than just me and my team. In invite you to take a look. If you’re impatient and want to see some screenshots before going to the trouble of installing it, visit the rfhub wiki here: https://github.com/boakley/robotframework-hub/wiki

What is robot framework hub?

What is the hub (I’ll use “rfhub” from here on out)? In short, rfhub is a light weight, zero configuration web application and api for serving up documentation for all of the robot framework keywords on your system.

Tired of hitting the internet for library documentation? rfhub solves that problem. Also, you can get documentation for all of the keywords in your local resource files and private libraries in addition to documentation for built-in keywords and installed libraries. Rfhub also allows you search across all your keywords at once.

Want to try it out? it’s crazy easy to get started. All you need is python and the robot framework, and a working internet connection. Open up a terminal or command prompt and issue these two commands:

$ pip install robotframework-hub
$ python -m rfhub

That’s it! Now you can browse to http://localhost:7070/doc to see the documentation for the keywords on your system. Want to use the api? http://localhost:7070/api/keywords will return all of the keywords as a JSON object. You can also search by name, or get a list of keywords for a particularly library.

If you want to tell it where to find your own keywords, just add one or more directories as arguments. For example, if you have keywords in /src/tests/keywords, you can run the hub like this to see the documentation for all of the resource files in that directory:

$ python -m rfhub /src/tests/keywords

Although serving documentation is all it does now, I have pretty big plans for the hub – I want it to have a dashboard to control your testing activities, a way to view robot framework documentation, and a UI for running tests and viewing test results amoung other ideas.

What rfhub is not

There’s another robot framework documentation system out there called rfdocs (http://www.rfdocs.org). rfhub is not a replacement for rfhub. It is, however, an alternative. Whereas rfdocs is an enterprise-class tool for managing the documentation for multiple versions of libraries, rfdoc is a tool specifically for viewing the documentation actually installed on your workstation.

Where can I find it?

rfhub is available on github: https://github.com/boakley/robotframework-hub

There’s a bit of information on that landing page, along with links to the source. Be sure to check out the wiki which you can get to from that landing page.

Want to contribute?

Would you like to contribute? I would love to have help growing rfhub into an indespensible part of your testing toolkit. rfhub is written in python and uses the flask web application framework. For the front end I use bootstrap.

Send me an email and we can work out the details.

Acknowledgements

A huge thank-you to my current employer, Echo Global Logistics (http://www.echo.com) who generously allow me to work on this project as part of my day job.