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Windows Automation Tools

WineBot includes support for popular Windows automation tools running inside the Wine environment.

Available Tools

Tool Command Description
AutoIt v3 autoit Powerful scripting language for Windows GUI automation.
AutoHotkey v1.1 ahk Automation scripting language for Windows.
Python 3.13 winpy Windows embedded Python.

Usage

These tools are in the system PATH and can be called directly.

AutoIt

Run an AutoIt script (.au3):

autoit my_script.au3

AutoHotkey

Run an AutoHotkey script (.ahk):

ahk my_script.ahk

Python (Windows)

Run a Python script (.py) using the Windows Python environment:

winpy my_script.py

Note: This is separate from the container's native Linux Python (python3). Use winpy when you need Windows-specific modules.

Note on pip: To minimize build time and image size, pip is not pre-installed in the winpy environment. winpy is intended for lightweight diagnostics and tracers using ctypes and the standard library. If you require pip at runtime, you can install it using:

curl -sL -o /tmp/get-pip.py https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py
winpy /tmp/get-pip.py

Wine UIA Status

Wine in this project currently runs as wine-10.0 (Debian 10.0~repack-6). In this runtime, UI Automation support is incomplete for pywinauto's uia backend and not reliable enough for default project use. Typical failures are during comtypes/UIA typelib initialization even when UIAutomationCore.dll is present.

Practical guidance:

  • Keep automation fallback paths available (AHK/AutoIt/X11/CV) for controls that are not accessible via win32.
  • Re-check pywinauto viability as Wine UIA support matures in newer Wine releases.

Smoke Tests

You can verify the tools are working by running the included smoke tests:

./tests/run_smoke_tests.sh

The smoke test now validates:

  • AutoIt + AHK scripting
  • Windows Python (winpy)
  • screenshot artifacts, including required /tmp/smoke_test.png

DEBUG Tool Version Output

If you start the container with DEBUG=1, entrypoint logs tool version/availability checks for:

  • autoit
  • ahk
  • winpy