🎭 Playwright

Documentation | API reference

Playwright is a framework for web automation and testing. It drives Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with a single API — in your tests, in your scripts, and as a tool for AI agents.

Get Started

Choose the path that fits your workflow:

Playwright Test

Playwright Test is a full-featured test runner built for end-to-end testing. It runs tests across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit with full browser isolation, auto-waiting, and web-first assertions.

Install

npm init playwright@latest

Or add manually:

npm i -D @playwright/test
npx playwright install

Write a test

import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';

test('has title', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('https://playwright.dev/');
  await expect(page).toHaveTitle(/Playwright/);
});

test('get started link', async ({ page }) => {
  await page.goto('https://playwright.dev/');
  await page.getByRole('link', { name: 'Get started' }).click();
  await expect(page.getByRole('heading', { name: 'Installation' })).toBeVisible();
});

Run tests

npx playwright test

Tests run in parallel across all configured browsers, in headless mode by default. Each test gets a fresh browser context — full isolation with near-zero overhead.

Key capabilities

Auto-wait and web-first assertions. No artificial timeouts. Playwright waits for elements to be actionable, and assertions automatically retry until conditions are met.

Locators. Find elements with resilient locators that mirror how users see the page:

page.getByRole('button', { name: 'Submit' })
page.getByLabel('Email')
page.getByPlaceholder('Search...')
page.getByTestId('login-form')

Test isolation. Each test runs in its own browser context — equivalent to a fresh browser profile. Save authentication state once and reuse it across tests:

// Save state after login
await page.context().storageState({ path: 'auth.json' });

// Reuse in other tests
test.use({ storageState: 'auth.json' });

Tracing. Capture execution traces, screenshots, and videos on failure. Inspect every action, DOM snapshot, network request, and console message in the Trace Viewer:

// playwright.config.ts
export default defineConfig({
  use: {
    trace: 'on-first-retry',
  },
});

npx playwright show-trace trace.zip