RIDE runs only on the regular Python, not on Jython nor IronPython. Python 2.7 is the minimum version. but RIDE 1.7.4 is the last version supporting Python 2.7. Please consider upgrading to Python 3.6 or 3.7. Python 3.8 WILL ONLY BE SUPPORTED ON FUTURE RIDE 2.0. (already possible in current pre-release, 2.0b1)

Most other operating systems than Windows have a recent enough Python installed by default. You can find Windows installers and plenty of other information from http://python.org.

RIDE's GUI is implemented using wxPython toolkit.

When installing wxPython, there are a series of requirements that should be installed automatically, but in some cases is better to install them before. For example, numpy under Python 2.7, requires version 1.16.1, and it can be installed before installing RIDE:

pip install numpy==1.16.1

On Linux is better to install wxPython before installing RIDE. This is because the correct package should be downloaded or installed directly from wxPython. Otherwise, the system will try to build the installation package and this takes time and not allways succeeds. For example, for Ubuntu 18.0.4 with Python 3.7 and GTK3, you could use:

sudo python3 -m pip install https://extras.wxpython.org/wxPython4/extras/linux/gtk3/ubuntu-18.04/wxPython-4.0.7.post2-cp37-cp37m-linux_x86_64.whl

If RIDE is used only to edit test cases, Robot Framework does not need to installed at all (but we have it on the requirements file). However, the Test runner plugin requires Robot Framework to be separately installed.

RIDE is no longer distributed as separate installation packages for Windows and for other platforms. We want to install with an universal method and that is using pip. However the zip package with source code is available from the download page.

• Get the source distribution.
• Extract it with the [File Explorer](https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/14200/windows-compress-uncompress-zip-files) Windows or with tar xzvf robotframework-ride-<version>.tar.gz on Linux or OS X.
• Go to the created directory and run python setup.py install. Notice that on Linux or OS X you typically need to prefix the command with sudo.

RIDE can also be installed with pip (only pip is the recommended method), or easy_install using either of these commands:

pip install robotframework-ride
easy_install robotframework-ride

This installs the current released version of RIDE. You can install other versions in pre-release mode by using:

pip install --pre robotframework-ride

This installation approach works on all operating systems but obviously requires you to have pip or easy_install installed. Notice that you may need to prefix the above commands with sudo on unixy machines.

You can install the current development version with:

pip install https://github.com/robotframework/RIDE/archive/master.zip

There are many options to pip like adding a -U when upgrading, or selecting a specific version, like in:

pip install -U robotframework-ride==1.7.4rc1

After a successful installation RIDE can be started from the command line by running ride.py. Alternatively you can specify a file or directory to open as an argument like ride.py path/to/tests. Starting from RIDE 0.54, you can also create a desktop shortcut during installation on Windows.

On Windows running ride.py requires having <PythonInstallationDir>\Scripts on PATH. If robot command to run tests with Robot Framework works you should be fine. If it does not, see Robot Framework installation instructions for more information about setting PATH.

If you use Cygwin on Windows, you may need to fix the shebang line in ride.py manually before running it.

To test the latest enhancements or fixes, you can easily checkout the latest RIDE sources from its version control system and run it directly from there. As a precondition you need to have Git and Invoke installed. After that, just run the following commands to clone RIDE's repository and start the latest version:

git clone https://github.com/robotframework/RIDE.git
cd RIDE
invoke devel [datasource]

To update your clone, run git pull in the RIDE directory.

You may see what options invoke provides with:

invoke --help
Usage: inv[oke] [--core-opts] task1 [--task1-opts] ... taskN [--taskN-opts]

Core options:

  --complete                       Print tab-completion candidates for given
                                   parse remainder.
  --hide=STRING                    Set default value of run()'s 'hide' kwarg.
  --no-dedupe                      Disable task deduplication.
  --write-pyc                      Enable creation of .pyc files.
  -c STRING, --collection=STRING   Specify collection name to load.
  -d, --debug                      Enable debug output.
  -e, --echo                       Echo executed commands before running.
  -f STRING, --config=STRING       Runtime configuration file to use.
  -h [STRING], --help[=STRING]     Show core or per-task help and exit.
  -l, --list                       List available tasks.
  -p, --pty                        Use a pty when executing shell commands.
  -r STRING, --root=STRING         Change root directory used for finding task
                                   modules.
  -V, --version                    Show version and exit.
  -w, --warn-only                  Warn, instead of failing, when shell
                                   commands fail.

These are the possible tasks for our RIDE project:

invoke --list
Available tasks:

  clean                  Clean bytecode files and remove `dist` and `build`
                         directories.
  deps                   Fetch and install development dependencies.
  devel                  Start development version of RIDE.
  generate_big_project   Generate big test data project to help perf testing.
  install                Install development version and dependencies.
  random_test            Use rtest go_find_bugs.py to randomly test RIDE API.
  register               Register current version to Python package index.
  release_notes          Download and format issues in markdown format.
  sdist                  Creates source distribution with bundled dependencies.
  test                   Run unit tests.
  update_robot           Update robot framework to specified commit or tag.
  version                Set `version.py` to given version.
  wininst                Creates Windows installer with bundled dependencies.

Current version of invoke is:

invoke --version
Invoke 0.12.2