Debugging Robot Framework tests¶

It’s not always so easy to get the used Selenium keywords right. There are a few ways to pause the test runner in middle of a test to ease figuring out what to do next:

Set the variable SELENIUM_RUN_ON_FAILURE to use the Debug-keyword provided in plone/app/robotframework/keywords.robot resource file, e.g. with:
```
$ ROBOT_SELENIUM_RUN_ON_FAILURE=Debug bin/test -t robot
```
Or when testing against robot-server, just run your test suite with provided script:
```
$ bin/robot-debug src/path/to/my/test.robot
```
This will stop the test automatically at the first failing step with the first working approach listed also below.

Use interactive robotframework-debuglibrary with Debug-keyword’ (requires that the used python is compiled with readline-support):

*** Settings ***

Force Tags  wip-not_in_docs

*** Test Cases ***

Start interactive debugger with Debug-keyword from DebugLibrary
    Import library  DebugLibrary
    Debug

Pause Selenium (WebDriver) completely to inspect your step with Pause execution keywords from Dialogs-library shipped with Robot Framework:

*** Test Cases ***

Pause tests with interactive pause execution -keyword
   Import library  Dialogs
   Pause execution

The above is also provided as Pause-keyword in keywords.robot resource file:

*** Settings ***

Resource  plone/app/robotframework/keywords.robot

*** Test Cases ***

Pause tests with included Pause-keyword
   Pause

Let Selenium (WebDriver) sleep for long time:

*** Test Cases ***

Pause test with non-interactive (and auto-continuing) sleep
   Sleep  10 min

Slow down Selenium (WebDriver) to make the tests easier to follow:
```
*** Settings ***

Suite setup  Set Selenium speed  0.5s
```

Use provided Python keyword to drop Zope server (or Robot Framework test runner) into debugger:

*** Test Cases ***

Pause test with Python debugger
     Import library  plone.app.robotframework.Debugging
     Stop

Write a custom python keyword into your custom Python keyword library to drop Zope server (or Robot Framework test runner) into debugger.

But there’s one catch in debugging your code while running Robot Framework tests: Robot may eat your standard input and output, which prevents you to just import pdb; pdb.set_trace().

Instead, you have to add a few more lines to reclaim your I/O at first, and only then let your debugger in:
```
import sys
import pdb
for attr in ('stdin', 'stdout', 'stderr'):
    setattr(sys, attr, getattr(sys, '__%s__' % attr))
pdb.set_trace()
```