Anatomy of a Skill Template

A Skill Template (CodeBundle) is a Robot Framework .robot file plus optional Jinja templates and generation rules. Every Skill Template follows the same structure.

The two types

A Skill Template can contain a Monitor, a Runbook, or both. They share the same file layout but do different jobs:

Type	File	When it runs	What it produces
Monitor (SLI)	sli.robot	On a schedule (every 30–600 seconds)	A 0–1 health score pushed to the platform
Runbook (TaskSet)	runbook.robot	On-demand (manual, AI-triggered, alert-triggered)	Issues with titles, descriptions, next steps, and report content

The Monitor watches; the Runbook investigates. A failing Monitor score can automatically trigger the Runbook.

.robot file structure

Using the curl-http-ok example:

*** Settings ***
Documentation       Checks if an HTTP endpoint returns a healthy response code
...                 within an acceptable latency threshold.
Metadata            Author    runwhen
Metadata            Display Name    HTTP OK Check
Metadata            Supports    HTTP,Web
Library             RW.Core
Suite Setup         Suite Initialization

*** Keywords ***
Suite Initialization
    ${URL}=    RW.Core.Import User Variable    URL
    ${TARGET_LATENCY}=    RW.Core.Import User Variable    TARGET_LATENCY    default=500
    ${DESIRED_RESPONSE_CODE}=    RW.Core.Import User Variable    DESIRED_RESPONSE_CODE    default=200
    Set Suite Variable    ${URL}
    Set Suite Variable    ${TARGET_LATENCY}
    Set Suite Variable    ${DESIRED_RESPONSE_CODE}

*** Tasks ***
Checking HTTP URL Is Available And Timely
    ${result}=    RW.Core.Shell    curl -s -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code} %{time_total}" ${URL}
    # Parse response code and latency, compare against thresholds
    # Push metric: 1.0 if healthy, 0.0 if not
    RW.Core.Push Metric    ${score}

Settings

• Documentation — brief summary of what the Skill Template does
• Metadata — Author, Display Name, Supports (platforms/technologies)
• Library — RW.Core (always), plus any codecollection-specific libraries
• Suite Setup — runs once before any Task; imports variables and secrets

Keywords

Reusable blocks. The Suite Initialization keyword imports user variables and secrets that all Tasks need.

Tasks

Each Task is independently executable. In a Monitor (sli.robot), the Task checks health and pushes a metric. In a Runbook (runbook.robot), each Task investigates a specific aspect and raises issues when problems are found.

Key libraries

Library	Purpose
RW.Core	Secrets, metrics, issues, reports, logging, services — see RW.Core Reference
RW.CLI	Shell command execution with structured output
BuiltIn	Standard Robot Framework keywords

CodeCollection layout

your-codecollection/
├── codebundles/
│   └── your-bundle/
│       ├── sli.robot          # Monitor (optional)
│       ├── runbook.robot      # Runbook (optional)
│       └── .runwhen/
│           └── generation-rules/
│               └── *.yaml     # Generation rules
├── libraries/
│   └── YourKeywords/          # Shared keyword libraries
├── requirements.txt
└── Dockerfile                 # FROM rw-base-runtime

See the Development Environment page for how to run and test, and the Generation Rules examples for how to wire discovery.