Testing a Rest Service with Robotframework

This project shows how to perform testing of a REST web service using the Robot framework.

Prerequisites

A PC (windows, macOS, linux) with a python3.8 installation is suggested. A virtual env for this project should be created, e.g. with the command

python3 -m venv flask-rest

The required python modules need to be installed in the virtual environment, e.g. with the commands

activate flask-rest
cd <git clone folder of this project>
pip install -r requirements.txt 

Server

The server is implemented as a flask app. It can be started e.g. in PyCharm with a right click on api_pass.py and selecting run.

Client: curl

The server can be tested with the curl command. Hint for windows users: curl is installed with git.

curl http://127.0.0.1:5000/entries

Client: Robotframework (in short RF)

A test is started with the robot command which takes a .robot file as argument that contains the test suite

robot client\api.robot

RF uses a keyword driven test approach. In the example the keywords Create Session and Get On Session are used to perform a REST get request in a test case called Get Entries:

Get Entries
    Create Session    api   http://localhost:5000
    ${resp}  Get On Session   api    /entries

Behaviour Driven Test (BDD)

It is possible to write BDD test with Robot Framework. The example api_robot.robot demonstrates this using an BDD-keyword implementation layer api_kw.robot.