Quickstart

Robotidy is easy to use and you can do it just by running:

robotidy path/to/file_or_directory.robot

Displaying the difference

If you want to see which lines are changed by tool add --diff flag:

robotidy --diff test.robot
--- test.robot before
+++ test.robot after
@@ -1,23 +1,15 @@
 *** Test Cases ***
Simple IF
-    IF    $condition1
-        Keyword    argument
-    END
-    IF    $condition2
-        RETURN
-    END
+    IF    $condition1    Keyword    argument
+    IF    $condition2    RETURN

Do not overwrite files

Pass --no-overwrite flag to not modify the files when running the Robotidy. Combine it with --diff to run a preview of how files will look after formatting:

robotidy --no-overwrite test.robot

Status code

By default Robotidy returns 0 exit code after successful run and 1 if there was an error. You can make Robotidy exit 1 if any file would be transformed by passing --check. By default files will not be transformed (same as running with --no-overwrite):

robotidy --check golden.robot
0
robotidy --check ugly.robot
1

If you want Robotidy to transform the files while using --check flag add --overwrite:

robotidy --check --overwrite file.robot

Configuration

See Configuration for information how to configure Robotidy.

Listing transformers

To see list of transformers included with Robotidy use --list:

> robotidy --list
              Transformers
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name                       ┃ Enabled ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩
│ AddMissingEnd              │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeSeparators        │ Yes     │
│ DiscardEmptySections       │ Yes     │
│ MergeAndOrderSections      │ Yes     │
│ RemoveEmptySettings        │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeAssignments       │ Yes     │
│ OrderSettings              │ Yes     │
│ OrderSettingsSection       │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeTags              │ Yes     │
│ OrderTags                  │ No      │
│ IndentNestedKeywords       │ No      │
│ AlignSettingsSection       │ Yes     │
│ AlignVariablesSection      │ Yes     │
│ AlignTemplatedTestCases    │ No      │
│ AlignTestCasesSection      │ No      │
│ AlignKeywordsSection       │ No      │
│ NormalizeNewLines          │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeSectionHeaderName │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeSettingName       │ Yes     │
│ ReplaceRunKeywordIf        │ Yes     │
│ SplitTooLongLine           │ Yes     │
│ SmartSortKeywords          │ No      │
│ RenameTestCases            │ No      │
│ RenameKeywords             │ No      │
│ ReplaceReturns             │ Yes     │
│ ReplaceBreakContinue       │ Yes     │
│ InlineIf                   │ Yes     │
│ Translate                  │ No      │
└────────────────────────────┴─────────┘
Transformers are listed in the order they are run by default. The status of the transformer will be displayed in different color if it is changed by the configuration.
To see detailed docs run:
    robotidy --desc transformer_name
or
    robotidy --desc all

Non-default transformers needs to be selected explicitly with --transform or configured with param `enabled=True`.

Pass optional value enabled or disabled to filter our output by the status of the transformer:

> robotidy --list disabled
                Transformers
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name                    ┃ Enabled ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩
│ OrderTags               │ No      │
│ IndentNestedKeywords    │ No      │
│ AlignTemplatedTestCases │ No      │
│ AlignTestCasesSection   │ No      │
│ AlignKeywordsSection    │ No      │
│ SmartSortKeywords       │ No      │
│ RenameTestCases         │ No      │
│ RenameKeywords          │ No      │
│ Translate               │ No      │
└─────────────────────────┴─────────┘
(...)

The configuration is reflected in the output. For example combining --transform (which only runs selected transformers) and enabled gives us:

> robotidy --transform DiscardEmptySections --list enabled
           Transformers
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name                 ┃ Enabled ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩
│ DiscardEmptySections │ Yes     │
└──────────────────────┴─────────┘
(...)

You can display short documentation on particular transformer with --desc:

> robotidy --desc DiscardEmptySections
Transformer DiscardEmptySections:

    Remove empty sections.
    Sections are considered empty if there are only empty lines inside.
    You can remove sections with only comments by setting 'allow_only_comments' parameter to False:

        *** Variables ***
        # this section will be removed with'alow_only_comments' parameter set to False

    Supports global formatting params: '--startline' and '--endline'.

    See https://robotidy.readthedocs.io/en/latest/transformers/DiscardEmptySections.html for more examples.

Transform selected lines

Most transformers support running Robotidy only on selected lines. Use --startline and --endline for this:

robotidy --startline 5 --endline 10 file.robot

If you want to disable formatting in particular files see disablers section in Configuration.

Transform code from standard input

Use - to load code from input:

cat file.robot | robotidy -

Line endings

When working on multiple platforms the file can contain different line endings (CRLF, LF). By default Robotidy will replace all line endings with system native line ending. It may be problematic if you’re using different platforms. You can force specific line ending or autodetect line ending used in the file and use it by configuring lineseparator option:

• native: use operating system’s native line endings (default)

• windows: use Windows line endings (CRLF)

• unix: use Unix line endings (LF)

• auto: maintain existing line endings (uses what’s used in the first line of the file)