Automation Series #1: Setting Appium and Robot Framework for Mobile Automation

Hi friends and followers!, As you probably don’t know (smiley-face) last year I started with QA in a Houston Company. There are a lot of experiences I got there and I really enjoyed the QA World, and all the process I was performing to them.

World moves and life also, so I decided to take a chance with another company called “Jobsity“, they brought me the opportunity to start with automation, regardless my lack of experience at that moment, they provided me the tools to make me feel in the zone with selenium and also they showed me how to use Robot Framework to automate all my test.

It was enough to feed my curiosity, and I started to search a possible way to automate my mobile test cases too but investing a minimal time in the process of learning how-to. So this post is the first part of the mobile automation using Robot Framework to perform all commands.



First, You need to have at least a few knowledge about Robot Framework, if you don’t. Take some minutes to learn a little bit about it. In the other hand, I am currently working on a mac, So I am going to show you how to configure the environment in order to use Appium+Robot in iOs.

 

What you need to know:

Appium User Interface is not completely done for MacOS Sierra (10.12), this is the first thing you will have to face once you want to setup Appium for automation in Mobile. I am warning you about this, because you can waste a lot of time trying to run it, with all the pieces of advice you find on the internet about how to set the interface, but luckily, there is another way to run it up and use it through command lines. Please perform each of this steps to complete the process.

 

First Step: Configure your SDK and its tools

You have to download Android SDK and Appium server. There is a lot of documentation on Internet about how to install Android SDK and Appium. Once you have them installed in your mac, try to test if they are running properly.

A good and fast way to test it is to run in your terminal the follow command: echo $ANDROID_HOME and it should show you the follow path:

/Users/Username*/Library/Android/sdk, where username should be the name of your user, in my case is Jobsity. I highly recommend you to install ANDROID STUDIO and open it. Once it is open, click on Configure -> SDK manager (Image 1.1), the SDK Manager window should be shown and it contains your SDK file location. It should match with the one printed out in your command line. In my case, the output of “echo $ANDROID_HOME” command was /Users/Jobsity/Library/ Android/sdk, and it matches perfectly with the one shown in the sdk manager window (See Image 1.2).

Image 1.1
Image 1.2

The last step you need to do is to configure the Android’s sdk tools. The best way is to ensure all the folders that SDK should have, they are actually in. So go to your terminal and type the path for your android home folder, as I said previously, mine is /Users/Jobsity/Library/ Android/sdk, so I just typed “Open /Users/Jobsity/Library/Android/sdk” in my terminal and it opened a directory with all folders for SDK. In that folder, there should be a folder called “platform-tools” (Image 1.3). Now you are sure the folder is indeed there. Make sure the PATH variable include the platform-tool route. Just type echo $PATH in your terminal and it should include a line with the follow output: “bin:/Users/Jobsity/Library/Android/sdk/tools:/Users/Jobsity/Library/Android/sdk /platform-tools”.

Image 1.3



If there is not that line you should configure first those variables in order to continue with the rest of my posts. There is a lot of information about how to configure those variables, so do a little research about this fact and once you have them configured, proceed with the rest of my tutorials series. They should be set as I mentioned before because it will make easier the rest of the process.  

 

PD: Jobsity is the new company I am working with! they are a great people and such of an amazing team. Do you want to know more about them? Just click here and read have a happy reading about my new company.

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