I’d like to introduce a preview release of a new tool I’m developing called robotframework-lint.

Robotframework-lint, or rflint for short, is a lint-like static analysis tool for robot framework plain text files. For a given test suite or resource file it will run a series of rules against the suite, its test cases and keywords.

The purpose is to automatically detect certain anti-patterns in your test assets. For example, it can catch duplicate test case or keyword names, flag deviances from local standards such as disallowing spaces in tag names.

A brief example

Consider the following test suite file:

*** Test Cases ***
| Hello, rflint!
| | [Tags] | example tag
| | log | hello, rflint!

This is what happens when you run rflint against this file:

$ python -m rflint hello.robot 
+ hello.robot
W: 1, 0: No suite documentation (RequireSuiteDocumentation)
E: 2, 0: space not allowed in tag name: 'example tag' (TagWithSpaces)
E: 3, 0: No testcase documentation (RequireTestDocumentation)

Rflint caught three problems:

• A warning that there is missing suite documentation on line 1
• An error saying that there is a tag with a space on line 2
• An error that there is missing test case documentation on line 3

If you want to ignore the TagWithSpaces error you can control that from the command line:

$ python -m rflint --ignore TagWithSpaces hello.robot
W: 1, 0: No suite documentation (RequireSuiteDocumentation)
E: 3, 0: No testcase documentation (RequireTestDocumentation)

rflint will exit with a zero exit code if no errors were found. Otherwise the exit code represents the number of errors. You can use this in a CI server or commit hook to prevent a test from being accepted if it has any errors.

Interactive help

You can get a list of all of the command line options by using the --help option:

$ python -m rflint --help
usage: python -m rflint [-h] [--error <RuleName>] [--ignore <RuleName>] [--warn <RuleName>] [--list]
                        [--no-filenames] [--format FORMAT]
                        ...

A style checker for robot framework plain text files
...

You can get a list of all of the currently installed rules with the --list option:

$ python -m rflint --list
'E DuplicateKeywordNames'
'E DuplicateTestNames'
'E RequireKeywordDocumentation'
'W RequireSuiteDocumentation'
'E RequireTestDocumentation'
'E TagWithSpaces'

A simple rule

Rules are python classes that implement an apply method. Depending on the inherited class, a rule may be given a reference to a suite object, a testcase object, or a keyword object.

Here is an example rule that checks for duplicate test case names within a suite:

import rflint.rule as rule

class DuplicateTestNames(rule.SuiteRule):
    '''Verify that no tests have a name of an existing test in the same suite'''
    severity = rule.ERROR

    def apply(self, suite):
        cache = []
        for testcase in suite.testcases:
            if name in cache:
                self.report(suite, testcase.linenumber, "Duplicate testcase name")
            cache.append(name)

Adding custom rules

Built-in rules can be found in the rules folder inside the rflint module. Rules are also looked for in a folder named site-rules, which is where your custom rules should go.

Where can I find robotframework-lint?

rflint is available on github: https://github.com/boakley/robotframework-lint

You can also install with pip, which will install the module “rflint” in the standard place:

$ pip install robotframework-lint

Online documentation

Being a preview release, documentation isn’t complete. However, what documentation there is can be found on the github wiki for the project, here:

https://github.com/boakley/robotframework-lint/wiki

Want to contribute?

Would you like to contribute? I would love to have help growing rflint into an indespensible part of the robot framework toolchain. There is an opportunity to work on the base code, or to contribute rules. Simply fork the repository and submit pull requests. You can also ask questions on the robotframework-users mailing list.

Acknowledgements

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