File discovery

Robocop by default search for any file with .robot and .resource extension in the current directory and its subdirectories.

You can limit where Robocop looks for files by passing list of paths:

robocop check tests/ bdd/ example.robot

While looking for the files, following options are taken into account:

  • --exclude, which allows to configure additional paths that will be ignored

  • --default-exclude, which defaults to .direnv, .eggs, .git, .svn, .hg, .nox, .tox, .venv, venv, dist

  • --include, which allows to configure additional paths that should be included (for example *.txt files)

  • --default-include, which defaults to *.robot, *.resource

Additionally Robocop finds and loads .gitignore files and exclude paths listed here. You can disable this behaviour with --skip-gitignore option.

Paths passed from the cli are always included. For example following command:

robocop format test.txt

Will format test.txt even if it doesn’t match --default-include filter. You can disable this behaviour with --force-exclude which will also apply exclude filters on paths passed from the cli directly.