Step ships a small set of officially-maintained, ready-to-use keyword libraries. This page lists them, and explains where they come from and how to use them. For where these libraries fit among the other Keyword types, see the Keywords overview.

Where they are published

The official prebuilt libraries are published as Maven artifacts under the group ch.exense.step.library on mvnrepository.com/artifact/ch.exense.step.library.

All libraries are released together and share the same version number.

Each library is itself packaged as a Step Automation Package (JAR format) containing the corresponding Keyword definitions. There is nothing special about them from Step’s point of view — deploying or referencing one uses exactly the same mechanisms as any other Automation Package.

Importing a library

Because a prebuilt library is just an Automation Package, deploying it into Step uses exactly the same mechanisms as any other Automation Package — no download/upload round-trip needed, just its Maven coordinate. For example, the http library:

<dependency>
    <groupId>ch.exense.step.library</groupId>
    <artifactId>step-library-kw-http</artifactId>
    <version>1.0.31</version>
</dependency>

Note: Your Step instance must be configured to access the Maven repository serving these artifacts.

Via the UI

Open the Upload Automation Package dialog and provide the Maven coordinate above instead of uploading a file.

Once deployed, the library’s Keywords are registered in the project like any other deployed Keyword — see Deployment of Keywords — and can be dragged directly into Plans from the visual Plan editor.

Via the CLI or Maven plugin

The same deployment can be done from the Step CLI or the Maven plugin, for example:

step ap deploy -p "mvn:ch.exense.step.library:step-library-kw-http:1.0.31"

Consuming library Keywords from within your own Automation Package

There are two ways to make a prebuilt library’s Keywords available to a Plan, and the choice is a deployment trade-off — similar to the one described for Automation Package Libraries. Either way, the Plan calls the Keyword the same way, with callKeyword.

Deploy the library centrally

Deploy the library as its own Automation Package on the target Step instance. Its Keywords are then available to any Plan on that instance — in the visual editor or authored in YAML — without being declared in your package’s keywords: section.

The trade-off: your Automation Package is no longer self-contained. It has an implicit runtime dependency on the library being present on whichever Step instance it’s deployed to or executed on — deploying your package to a different instance or project without the library first will break it.

Declare it directly in the Automation Package (self-contained)

To keep your Automation Package self-contained, bundle the library jar (downloaded from Maven, see above) alongside your package and declare each Keyword you use in the keywords: section using the GeneralScript type. See Prebuilt library keywords in the Automation Package Descriptor documentation for the full YAML syntax and an example.

This is the approach used by the Playwright Test Runner sample, which downloads step-library-kw-system and declares its ExecuteBash Keyword explicitly so the package runs unmodified on any Step instance.