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Diagnostics

Session server

RED is using small python script robot_session_server.py as a bridge between the IDE itself and your Robot Framework installation. This is needed for various reasons: checking RF version so that files are validated accordingly, generating library documentations, running RfLint, providing variables from python files and so on.

Sometimes when diagnosing problems with RED it may be desirable to take a look at operations performed by robot_session_server.py process. By default this server runs in background invisibly for users. There are however two possibilities to have a deeper look.

1. Displaying server console

1. Exit RED
2. edit RED.ini file (or eclipse.ini if you're using eclipse with RED installed as a feature)
3. add -Dred.showSessionConsole=true line somewhere after -vmargs line
4. start RED/eclipse again

After starting again there should be server output visible in Console view. Server is logging every call coming from RED together with arguments as well as results/exceptions of that call.

2. Running server manually and connecting to it

Firstly server script files has to be obtained. They can be downloaded from GitHub (all files except TestRunnerAgent.py are needed). Alternatively those files can be copied from temporary directory of your system when RED is running: go to temporary directory and look for a directory with name starting from RobotTempDir containing same python files as on GitHub.

1. Start server by issuing:
   python robot_session_server.py 12345
   in command line
2. this will start server on port 12345 at localhost
3. exit RED
4. edit RED.ini file (or eclipse.ini if you're using eclipse with RED installed as a feature)
5. add -Dred.connectToServerAt=127.0.0.1:12345 line somewhere after -vmargs line
6. start RED/eclipse again

After starting again RED should connect to manually started session server.