Free RPA for Everyone!!
Are you tired off spending a big part of your annual budget on expensive Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tools to automate mundane stuff? Even if you just start off with those expensive RPA tools to create some PoCs or to check fitment of RPA for your manual processes, It would take months or atleast an year to get some results. By the time you would end-up spending a full bag of money.
There are some RPA vendors out there claims to offer open-source RPA tools and community edition but you need to be careful from their ball and chain.
What if I tell you that there is an amazing open-source RPA tool available in the market which is compeltly free. Top of that it works with Windows, Linux and MacOS. It is called TagUI.
What is TagUI?
TagUI — AI Singapore, a government-funded programme to accelerate AI. You can write flows in simple Python language and automate away repetitive time-consuming tasks on your computer. Tasks include those on websites (native support for Chrome and Edge), desktop apps, or the command line. The TagUI project is open-source and free forever. It’s easy to setup and use, and works on Windows, macOS and Linux. Besides English, flows can be written in 22 other languages, so you can do RPA using your native language.
What is RPA for Python?
RPA for Python formerly known as TagUi for Python is a package which was developed by Kensoh an Ex-Test Engineer of DBS Bank. It is based on TagUI and a collection of ready-made classes or functions which can be used by passing some parameters.
What all you can automate?
RPA for Python’s simple and powerful API makes robotic process automation fun! You can use it to quickly automate away repetitive time-consuming tasks on websites, desktop applications, or the command line. It comes with below listed automation capabilities:
- Web Automation
- Visual Automation
- OCR Automation
- Keyboard Automation
- Mouse Automation
How to use RPA for Python?
Step 1:
Since it is written and designed in Python, you will have to install a Pyhon package by using following command in the command prompt:
pip install rpaStep 2:
Open your faviourt code editior and start writing the following codes.
import rpa as rNotes on different operating systems and optional visual automation mode -
🏳️🌈 Windows — if visual automation is cranky, try setting your display zoom level to recommended % or 100%
🍎 macOS — Catalina update introduces tighter app security, see solutions for PhantomJS and Java popups
🐧 Linux — visual automation mode requires special setup on Linux, see how to install OpenCV and Tesseract
Step 3:
Let’s understand a simple use case of web automation using RPA for Python.
WEB AUTOMATION 🕸️
r.init()
r.url('https://www.google.com')
r.type('//*[@name='q']', 'decentralization[enter]')
print(r.read('result-stats'))
r.snap('page', 'results.png')
r.close()VISUAL AUTOMATION 🙈
r.init(visual_automation = True)
r.dclick('outlook_icon.png')
r.click('new_mail.png')
...
r.type('message_box.png', 'message')
r.click('send_button.png')
r.close()Step 4:
Save the file with .py extension and enjoy the power of automation!!
Wasn’t it that easy? I will be writting some more use cases.
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