BROWSER

Getting started

Getting started

Install Browser, write a first test, and run it.

Install the library and its browser binaries, write one test, run it.

Before you start

You need Python 3.10 or newer and Node.js with npm on your PATH — rfbrowser init runs npm ci --omit=dev and npx playwright install underneath, and if npm is not on the PATH it stops with Couldn't execute npm. Please ensure you have node.js and npm installed and in PATH.

Do this in a virtual environment — uv, venv or pyenv, whichever your team uses. Never install into the system Python: the install writes into site-packages, so it needs root there and is painful to unpick afterwards.

There is a second route that needs no Node.js at all, and it is the simpler one if you have no particular reason to want Node on the machine — see how Browser works once you are running.

Install

$ pip install robotframework-browserSuccessfully installed robotframework-browser-20.3.0$ rfbrowser initInstalling node dependencies...Installing browser binaries to 0rfbrowser init completed

rfbrowser init downloads three browser engines, so it is the slow part and it needs a few hundred megabytes. You only do it once per environment.

Your first test

The assertion is part of the keyword — Get Title both reads and checks.

The browser runs headless by default, so this prints a result without anything appearing on screen. To watch it, open the browser yourself above New Page:

New Browser    chromium    headless=False
*** Settings ***Library    Browser*** Test Cases ***Open The Keyword Reference    New Page     https://robotframework-browser.org    Get Title    *=    Robot Framework Browser    Click        nav[aria-label="Main"] >> text="Keywords"    Get Title    *=    Keyword reference
Robot Framework9 linesUTF-8

It drives this site, so you can run it right now without an application of your own — and the pages it touches are the ones you are reading.

Two things are doing work in that selector, and both are worth copying.

>> chains: everything left of it narrows the search, so text="Keywords" is looked for only inside the main navigation. The page has a second link with that exact text — in the row of figures on the landing page — and Playwright is strict: a selector matching more than one element is an error, not a silent first-match.

The quotes make it an exact match. Without them, text=Keywords is a case-insensitive substring, which would also find "keywords" inside a sentence. See selectors.

Run it

bash
$ robot first.robotOpen The Keyword Reference | PASS |1 test, 1 passed, 0 failed

Robot Framework writes log.html into the directory you ran robot from — not next to the test file — unless you pass --outputdir. Open it — every keyword, its arguments and its result are in there, and it is the first place to look when something fails.

What is not in that test

No Sleep, and no wait keyword before anything. Two different mechanisms are doing that work:

  • Action keywords like Click wait for the element to be actionable — attached, visible, stable and able to receive the click — before acting.
  • Assertions like the Get Title line above re-read the value until it matches or the retry window expires.

So a keyword with an assertion operator is itself the wait. A getter without one reads once and returns. That distinction is the whole of assertions.