Formatter

Format your Robot Framework code by running:

robocop format

It will recursively discover all *.robot and *.resource files in the current directory.

You can also use a specific path or paths:

robocop format resources/etc test.robot

Robocop will also find and skip paths from .gitignore files. It is possible to configure how Robocop discovers files using various options (see file discovery).

Formatter selection

Robocop can be configured to run only selected formatters. You can see what rules are currently enabled by running:

robocop list formatters

The following options can be used to select rules:

• --select (see configuration reference) to only run selected formatters
• --extend-select (see configuration reference) to load default and selected formatters

It is also possible to disable rules not available in the selected Robot Framework version using target version.

Rules can be also disabled in the code using disablers directives.

Displaying the difference

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

> robocop format --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

The difference is colorized by default (green for added and red for removed lines). You can disable this behaviour with color option:

cli toml

robocop format --diff --no-color

[tool.robocop.format]
diff = true
color = false

File write mode

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

robocop format --no-overwrite test.robot

Status code

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

> robocop format --check golden.robot
0
> robocop format --check ugly.robot
1

If you want Robocop to format the files while using --check flag, add --overwrite:

robocop format --check --overwrite test.robot

Formatter configuration

Formatters that support configuration can be configured using --configure option.

List of formatters

To see the list of formatters included with Robocop use robocop list formatters:

> robocop list formatters
┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┳━━━━━━━━━┓
┃ Name                       ┃ Enabled ┃
┡━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━╇━━━━━━━━━┩
│ NormalizeSeparators        │ Yes     │
│ MergeAndOrderSections      │ Yes     │
│ ReplaceWithVAR             │ No      │
│ GenerateDocumentation      │ No      │
│ OrderSettings              │ Yes     │
│ OrderSettingsSection       │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeTags              │ Yes     │
│ OrderTags                  │ No      │
│ RenameVariables            │ No      │
│ IndentNestedKeywords       │ No      │
│ AlignSettingsSection       │ Yes     │
│ AlignVariablesSection      │ Yes     │
│ AlignTemplatedTestCases    │ No      │
│ AlignTestCasesSection      │ No      │
│ AlignKeywordsSection       │ No      │
│ NormalizeNewLines          │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeSectionHeaderName │ Yes     │
│ NormalizeSettingName       │ Yes     │
│ SplitTooLongLine           │ Yes     │
│ SmartSortKeywords          │ No      │
│ RenameTestCases            │ No      │
│ RenameKeywords             │ No      │
│ InlineIf                   │ Yes     │
│ Translate                  │ No      │
└────────────────────────────┴─────────┘
To see detailed docs run:
    robocop docs formatter_name
Non-default formatters needs to be selected explicitly with --select or configured with param `enabled=True`.

You can display short documentation on particular formatter with docs formatter command:

> robocop docs NormalizeTags
Formatter NormalizeTags:

Normalize tag names by normalizing case and removing duplicates.

Example usage:

robocop format --select NormalizeTags.case=lowercase test.robot

Other supported cases: uppercase, title case. The default is lowercase.

See https://robocop.dev/stable/formatter/formatters/NormalizeTags/ for more information.

Line endings

See line endings for details how to configure line endings.

Rerun the formatting in place

Because of the high independence of each formatter, Robocop runs them in specific order to obtain predictable results. But sometimes the subsequent formatter modifies the file to the point that it requires another run of the Robocop. A good example would be one formatter that replaces the deprecated syntax, but a new syntax is inserted using standard whitespace. If there is formatter that aligns this whitespace according to special rules (like AlignKeywordsSection) we need to run Robocop again to format this whitespace.

This could be inconvenient in some cases where the user had to rerun Robocop without knowing why. That's why Robocop now has the option --reruns that allows to define limit of how many extra reruns Robocop can perform if the file keeps changing after the formatting. The default is 0. Recommended value is 3 although in the vast majority of cases one extra run should suffice (and only in cases described above).

See reruns for details how to configure reruns.

Note that if you enable it, it can double the execution time of Robocop (if the file was modified, it will be formatted again to check if the next formatting does not further modify the file).