How to deploy an attended UiPath robot?

Don’t you just hate it when you are in a remote call, setting up an attended bot for a user, just to find that something’s not working and you have to figure out which prerequisite is missing or which step you’ve missed in the configuration? There are of course some simple steps to successfully deploy an attended robot, but every time we put them into practice, there is one more detail we miss or a step we forget. So we built a written guide to help us remember all the steps, and we’re sharing it with you.

Prerequisites

Before we actually deploy our solution, we need to make sure that we have all the prerequisites ready:

• First things first, where will the robot run?

  An implementation of the attended bots means that one or more users will have a robot installed on their client's desktop. There are different supported client scenarios, detailed in our blogpost on infrastructure set-up for attended automation.

  P.S.: If you are worried about the fact that a running robot on your PC would mean that you cannot do any work during that time, there is a game-changing feature for UiPath attended automation - Picture in Picture - which allows the end user to work in parallel with the robot, while overseeing the robot’s activity.

• Then, in order to install and copy all the files needed for deployment, we need an administrator account with the necessary rights on the target machine. More often than not, especially in enterprise environments, the end user will not have administrator rights on their PC, so make sure you are in sync with somebody from the IT team who can assist.

• For the installation of UiPath Assistant, we need a license code. There are more types of license management, depending on the deployment type: Automation Cloud, On-Premises, or Standalone License. Find out more about licensing in the official documentation.

• Last but not least, have your automation files - process packages and dependencies - ready in a location that you can access from the target environment (e.g. a publicly available SharePoint document library, if you’re deploying to a remote environment).

Deployment steps

Step 1: Run the UiPath Assistant installer on the machine where you want the attended bot to run

If you have a cloud Orchestrator

Use the UiPathStudioCloud.msi installer.

For on-premises setup (including standalone)

Use the UiPathStudio.msi installer.

Choose Custom installation

Then, go to Advanced Settings for Attended Robot.

Installation should be done in User Mode. The User Mode Robot is best suited in attended automation scenarios. It runs under the user that starts it and has the exact rights as that particular user.

Step 2: Licensing

A: Licensing with a Standalone license

B: Licensing with Orchestrator - enter the full tenant URL

Step 3: Select Extensions

Don’t forget to check the tools that you need in your process, such as the extension for the browser that the robot will use (if applicable)

Step 4: Deploy the package

Standalone scenario

Add the package of your process in %ProgramData%\UiPath\Packages folder.

Orchestrator scenario

Upload the package(s) of your process in Orchestrator Tenant -> Packages.

Step 5: Deploy dependencies

Standalone scenario

Add the dependencies of your process in %ProgramFiles%\UiPath\Studio\Packages folder.

Orchestrator scenario

Upload the dependencies of your process in Orchestrator Tenant -> Packages -> Libraries.

Need help finding the dependencies?

Dependencies panel in UiPath Studio

As you surely know, they are listed in your Studio on the top left region.

But what is not obvious, is where their actual location is on the file system:

• %ProgramFiles%\UiPath\Studio\Packages (for a 64-bit Windows)

• %ProgramFiles(x86)%\UiPath\Studio\Packages (for a 32-bit Windows)

Step 6: Configure applications

Make sure that your applications are configured in the way that you developed your bot. For example, if your process is using SAP desktop application, make sure SAP scripting is enabled. Or if you use Excel Application Scope, then the Excel app should be installed on the robot machine. Also, make sure the language is set the same way as on the dev environment.

Step 7: Start the bot!

That’s it, you can now start UiPath Assistant and your process should be ready to be installed and run.

Final considerations

Please note that if you have a Standalone License (so you don’t have an Orchestrator), make sure that no assets are used in the process. As an alternative, you can store most of your configurations in an Excel file on the disk. For credentials though, the secure way to store them (in lack of an Orchestrator) is the Windows Credential Manager on the user’s machine where you are deploying the robot.

Finally, we all know that the initial bot installation is actually the start of a “new development phase”, involving change requests and bug fixes that come as a result of actual productive use of the bot. So you will actually need to deploy new versions of the bot to the user’s machine over and over. And since we’re an automation company, we’ve built a small bash script that copies the packages to their respective location with a single click.

# place your packages in the "Packages" and "Dependencies" folders, together with the script file
xcopy /e /i /y /s Packages "%ProgramData%\UiPath\Packages"
xcopy /e /i /y /s Dependencies "%ProgramFiles%\UiPath\Studio\Packages"
pause

Happy automation! 🤖