Robot Tests

Robot tests are browser-driven acceptance tests: they drive a real Odoo in a real browser and assert on what a user would see. zodoo provides the tooling to create and run them locally; zCICD runs the same tests in CI.

Setting up a project

One command does the whole setup:

odoo robot setup

It is idempotent — safe to run again on a project that is already set up.

odoo robot setup performs every step that used to be done by hand:

1. Adds odoo-robot_utils to gimera.yml if it is not already there:

   - branch: main
     path: addons_robot
     type: integrated
     url: git@github.com:Odoo-Ninjas/odoo-robot_utils

2. Adds robot_utils to the install list in MANIFEST.

3. Adds addons_robot to addons_paths in MANIFEST.

4. Creates a Robot Framework virtualenv at ~/.robotenv and installs the requirements into it.

5. Runs gimera apply recursively, with update and missing-only, to fetch the repository.

note

Before running it, make sure your modules install cleanly on an empty database:

odoo -f db reset
odoo update

Creating a test

odoo robot new smoketest

This copies addons_robot/robot_utils/tests/test_template.robot to tests/smoketest.robot and prints the command to run it. It refuses to overwrite an existing file.

odoo robot new invokes odoo robot setup first. Pass -I (--no-install-pip) to skip that — useful when the environment is already prepared and you just want the file.

Anatomy of a test file

A generated test has three sections:

Section	Purpose
Settings	Imports and configuration. Usually fine as generated
Test Cases	The tests themselves — rewrite these for your use case
Keywords	Reusable Robot functions

Declare which modules a test needs with comments at the top of the file:

#odoo-require: crm,sale_stock
#odoo-uninstall: partner_autocomplete

zodoo reads these and prepares the database accordingly before the run.

Running tests

odoo robot run tests/smoketest.robot
odoo robot run                          # pick from available tests
odoo robot run --all

Development mode is required — running robot tests aborts otherwise.

Options

Option	Default	Effect
-u, --user	admin	Odoo user to log in as
-a, --all		Run every test
-n, --test_name		Run a single named test case within the file
--param key=value		Pass variables to the test; repeatable
--parallel	1	Number of parallel robot runs
--tags		Restrict to tagged tests
--timeout	20	Seconds to wait for an element to become visible
--repeat	1	Run the test repeatedly — useful for flaky tests
--repeat-no-init		Repeat without re-initialising between runs
--min-success-required	100	Minimum success percentage when using --repeat
--test-tv		Run the browser non-headless so you can watch at /test.tv/
--debug		Attach VS Code to debugpy using the created profile
--output-json		Emit results as JSON
--results-file		Path for results.json
--keep-token-dir		Keep the intermediate run directory
--no-install-further-modules		Do not install additional modules for the run

Watching a run

--test-tv runs the browser in non-headless mode and streams it to /test.tv/, so you can watch the test drive the UI. This is the quickest way to understand why an assertion fails.

zCICD exposes the same view through its Test TV action on a branch.

Other commands

Command	Purpose
odoo robot list	List the available robot tests
odoo robot run-all	Run every robot matching the robotests file patterns
odoo robot cleanup	Clean up after runs
odoo robot make-variable-file	Generate the .robot-vars variables file
odoo robot start-cobot	Start cobot, reachable at http://<host>/cobot

Working in VS Code

odoo robot setup creates the ~/.robotenv virtualenv specifically so editor extensions can find a Robot Framework interpreter — the RobotCode extension picks it up.

Once it is installed:

• The test tube icon in the activity bar lists the tests in the project.
• Each test has a play icon in the editor gutter to run or re-run it.
• Breakpoints can be set directly in the .robot file, and --debug attaches the debugger.
• A running test can be stopped from the toolbar.

If the interpreter is not detected, point the extension at ~/.robotenv/bin/python.

Running the same tests in CI

zCICD runs these tests as part of a test run, alongside unit tests and migration tests. It applies the same tag filters, and can run the suite at several parallelism levels to load-test the system.

See the zCICD documentation on test runs for how results are reported and how zCICD decides which tests to skip.