Environment requirements for installation

Make sure you have a license file for Robin Robot before starting the installation!

Workstation requirements

  1. RAM not less than 4Gb, free disk space from 5 Gb

  2. Astra Linux 1.7.2, with basic security profile settings (no Windows domain entry)

  3. Account with administrator rights (sudo)

  4. Presence of an installed dotnet-sdk-6.0. Installation guide from the developer of Astra Linux OS: https://wiki.astralinux.ru/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=41192241. Another installation method is described in Appendix 1.

  5. Stable connection to official Astra Linux repositories (access to the Internet or to local mirrors of RED OS package repositories)
  6. To work with browser automation - it is necessary to make sure that one of the browsers is available, if necessary - install one of the supported in the current release:

If custom-designed robots are included, these robots may require a specific browser version to perform (in this case, consult the robot developer).

Installation process

Required materials:

  1. Archive with distribution packages in *.tar.gz format
  2. License file in *.lic or *.licx format 

Extract the archive with the distribution files to a new directory inside your home directory (e.g. ~/dist). To do this, open the directory with the archive in File Manager, launch Terminal from it and execute the commands.

mkdir -p ~/dist

tar -xvzf <archive name> -C ~/dist

Go inside the directory with the extracted archive.

cd ~/dist

It is recommended that you use the automatic installation and configuration script.

When typing commands and names in the terminal, you can use the Tab key, which completes the name after typing the first three characters if there are no other matches.

Installation

The following files must be present in the directory, along with the installation packages:

rpa-robin-install-deb-std.sh

rpa-robin-check-user-group.sh

Installation with ready license

If you were provided with a ready-made license file, run the command to install it:

sudo ./rpa-robin-install-deb-std.sh ./<имя файла лицензии> 

Watch the messages on the screen. The installation process may take a few minutes.

Installation without license

To install, run the command:

sudo ./rpa-robin-install-deb-std.sh 

Watch the messages on the screen. The installation process may take a few minutes.

When the installation is complete, you will have an automatically created license request file - envId.txt - in the current directory. Send the resulting envId.txt license request file to Technical Support.

After receiving the permanent license file, install it (copy the license file to the current directory):

sudo cp ./<license file name> /opt/RobinPlatform/2.0.0/Agent/

sudo chmod 0644 /opt/RobinPlatform/2.0.0/Agent/<license file name>

sudo cp ./<license file name> /opt/RobinPlatform/2.0.0/RobotPlayer/

sudo chmod 0644 /opt/RobinPlatform/2.0.0/RobotPlayer/<license file name>

Adding the current user to the rpa-robin group

Once the installation is complete, check to see if the current user is in the rpa-robin group to work with robots. You can use the attached utility to do this:

./rpa-robin-check-user-group.sh

If the user is not present in the group - you can do this with the command:

sudo usermod -aG rpa-robin $USER

It is recommended to restart the operating system for the user's participation in the group to take effect.

Without participation in the rpa-robin group, the user will not be able to execute robots.

The user will only be in the group in the next session if their account was not included in the rpa-robin group during previous installations. For the user's participation in the group to take effect, you must terminate the user's session in the operating system and open a new session.

Execute the command for initial configuration of drivers for web browsers (executed once for the user):

cli-robin webdrivers-bootstrap

If a configuration file already exists in the system, a confirmation will be displayed to overwrite the file. It is recommended to overwrite the file after installing the platform.

Launching robots

The versions of the actions used in the robot must be present in the installed platform for the robot to execute successfully.

The robot can be launched in 2 ways:

  1. From the file manager - by right-clicking - the item Open in Robin Player at the top of the context menu; or by double-clicking the file icon with the mouse

  2. In terminal: robinplayer <path to file or file name if in current directory>

When launching the robot, a terminal window with progress messages will open. After successful execution the window will close automatically, in case of a critical robot error it will remain open for viewing, it can be closed using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C

Launching the robot from the robot may not work from the user's home directory - in this case they will require explicit installation of the rpa-robin group-owner and read permissions for members of the rpa-robin group.

If you need to uninstall Robin Platform, you can use the standard operating system commands (apt, apt-get).

Uninstall:

sudo apt remove -y rpa-robin-core...

(Press Tab at the end of typing the name instead of the ellipsis - the exact name of the package will be displayed.)

Working in a multi-user environment

If several different users are running on the system and launching the same robots, there may be conflicts at the level of temporary files in the shared /tmp directory.

To avoid conflicts, on computers with multiple users, it is recommended to clear the temporary files in the /tmp directory of which after finishing work and before logging out.

The cleanup command:

rm -f /tmp/*.robin*

Updating browser drivers

If it is required to update the browser drivers, it is possible to download the necessary driver version (from the driver or browser developer's resource). The structure of directories with drivers inside the installed Robin platform inside the directory

/opt/RobinPlatform/2.0.0/drivers/browser

has the following structure (the directory with the browser name, then the directory with the driver name and version, inside which the driver itself is located):

  1. Download the driver, unzip if it is archived, place it in a directory named in the format name-version
  2. Make sure it is a usable file for everyone:
    chmod +x yandexdriver
  3. Сopy the directory with the driver to the desired path, for example:
    sudo  cp -a yandexdriver-23.3.1.755  /opt/RobinPlatform/2.0.0/drivers/browser/yandex/
  4. Add an entry to the configuration file ~/.robin/env/cfg similar to the existing entries in the file (note that for the Yandex version only three digits without a dot are specified on the left side of the lines - e.g. 229 instead of 22.9.1.1110):


Robot log view console

A tool for viewing logs has been added. On the tool bar at the top of the window, you can switch to the tabs for Agent logs, Java actions, and Python actions. Up to 1000 recent log entries are displayed in a table. After starting the robot, you can click the Update button to download new entries.

Launch the tool from the command line in a normal user session:

gui-robin

Window with color inversion (black background):

gui-robin --dark



Appendix 1. Option for installing .NET

Installing .NET:

sudo apt install -y curl

cd ~

curl -L https://download.visualstudio.microsoft.com/download/pr/e77438f6-865f-45e0-9a52-3e4b04aa609f/024a880ed4bfbfd3b9f222fec0b6aaff/dotnet-runtime-6.0.25-linux-x64.tar.gz -o dotnet-runtime-6.0.25-linux-x64.tar.gz

sudo mkdir -p /opt/vendor/dotnet

sudo tar xzf ./dotnet-runtime-*.tar.gz -C /opt/vendor/dotnet/

sudo ln -sf /opt/vendor/dotnet/dotnet /usr/local/bin/dotnet