We have developed some resources files to build tests in robot framework. We want to use this in the customer environment but we don’t want to share the source code. Can we turn the code into binary or some other encoding that can be used to build tests with robot framework in the customer environment?
Someone can help me?
Hi,
welcome to the forum.
I doubt that it is possible to hide source code. Robot Framework (like Python) is an interpreter language and it is in the nature of interpreter languages that the source code is the deliverable.
If you want to hide source code, i am afraid that you would have to implement the keywords in a compiler language (C, Java…). Not sure, if that would be worth the effort.
Kind regards,
Markus
Thank you for your reply.
Best regards,
Federico
Hi Federico,
As Markus(@Noordsestern) mentioned not really possible by default with robot framework, but I guess if you built a custom wrapper you could deliver the robot files as a single “proprietary” file (e.g. a zip of .7z file with a different extension to obscure what it actually is) and then have the wrapper code extract the robot files to a temporary location, execute robot with those files and then clean up removing the robot files.
Some with moderate technical know how could probably reverse engineer this is and figure out what the wrapper does, so not a completely secure solution but maybe enough for your needs.
I’m not recommending to do this, I’ve not even tried it, and it’s not likely to be supported in anyway so you’d have to take full responsibility for owning/maintaining/supporting this type of solution, but it was my idea of how I would solve this problem if I needed to.
Dave.