CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pythonmultithreadingrobotframework
Sachin Nikam
Sachin Nikam

Reputation: 137

Locking a file in robotframework

I am using robotframework. I am using pabot to run test suites in parallel.

While running I need to make sure that a file is accessible by one process at a time and other should wait for the process to release that file.

I understand that it could be done through multithreading in python. I am newbie to python. I need help to solve this issue.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1393

Answers (1)

Bryan Oakley
Bryan Oakley

Reputation: 385950

There is nothing built-in to robot to handle file locking. There's also no built-in cross-platform mechanism for file locking. However, there are external packages that can do file locking. For example, the lockfile package looks like a good candidate.

What I recommend is to create a custom keyword in python that does the reading after acquiring the lock. It might look something like this if you're using the lockfile package:

# lock_keywords.py
from lockfile import LockFile

def read_file_with_locking(filename):
    lock = LockFile(filename)
    with lock:
        with open(filename, "r") as f:
            data = f.read()
    return data

You would then use it in a test like this:

*** Settings ***
| Library | lock_keywords.py

*** Test Cases ***
| Read a file, with locking
| | ${data}= | Read file with locking | /tmp/junk.txt
| | log | data: ${data}

I only tested this on a Mac, by opening an interactive python shell and acquiring a lock on the file using the lockfile library, and then running the test in a different window. The test paused until I manually released the lock in the interactive session, at which point it was able to acquire the lock and read the file.

Upvotes: 1

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