Install and setup Robocorp Lab

To build, test, and run your robot, you decide to use Robocorp Lab, because you heard that it offers everything you need to create software robots in one simple package, using human-readable syntax. It's a full Integrated Development Environment (IDE), and free to use!

Visual Studio Code users can follow along using Robocorp extensions, although we focus on using Robocorp Lab in this course!

It will also be easy to integrate with Control Room, allowing you to execute the robot completely in the cloud! And get email notifications! Create workspaces with your future colleagues! Execute the same robot in a mix of cloud containers, physical machines, and self-hosted servers!

All this sounds really good, but you are getting a bit ahead of yourself. Let's concentrate on getting up and running.

Setup Robocorp Lab and your Control Room account

Time for some setup work! You will need to register for Control Room, install Robocorp Lab, and link it to your Control Room account.

  1. Sign up for a Robocorp account and follow the instructions.
  2. Download and install Robocorp Lab for your operating system.
  3. Link Robocorp Lab to your Robocorp account.

Done? Great!

Open Robocorp Lab and download the starter files for the course

Our Portal site contains useful example robots that you can easily download and edit with your favorite software, including all you need to work on your robot in this course.

When creating a complex robot, it's useful to break down what it does in multiple steps. Different steps can be run in different environments. For example, getting some data from an external system could be done by an instance running in the cloud, and working on a Windows program can be done by a physical machine running Robocorp Workforce Agent. Anyway, you don't need to worry about this for now. Our robot will be simple enough to fit all in one robot.

  1. Open Robocorp Lab.
  2. Visit the Robot Spare Bin Intranet Robot Starter Files example robot page on the Robocorp Portal site.
  3. Click on the Get robot button, and select Open in Robocorp Lab in the modal window: Getting the starter files from Portal
  4. The browser will show a notice asking for confirmation to open Robocorp Lab. Click on Open Robocorp Lab: Accepting notice
  5. In Robocorp Lab, assign or accept the robot's name and choose a directory where to store the code. Then click on Open Robot. Lab setting up shared robot

Once the robot is open, you will see this:

Robocorp Lab README

Great! Now we are ready to start building!