UI Testing with Playwright

Introduction

Playwright Test was created specifically to accommodate the needs of end-to-end testing. Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Test on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on CI, headless or headed with native mobile emulation of Google Chrome for Android and Mobile Safari.

Installation

Installing Playwright

Get started by installing Playwright using npm or yarn. Alternatively, you can also get started and run your tests using the VS Code Extension.

npm

npm init playwright@latest

yarn

yarn create playwright

pnpm

pnpm init playwright@latest

Run the install command and select the following to get started:

  • Choose between TypeScript or JavaScript (default is TypeScript)
  • Name of your Tests folder (default is tests or e2e if you already have a tests folder in your project)
  • Add a GitHub Actions workflow to easily run tests on CI
  • Install Playwright browsers (default is true)

Getting Started

What's Installed

Playwright will download the browsers needed as well as create the following files:

  • playwright.config.ts
  • package.json
  • package-lock.json
  • tests/
    • example.spec.ts
  • tests-examples/
    • demo-todo-app.spec.ts

The playwright.config is where you can add configuration for Playwright, including modifying which browsers you would like to run Playwright on. If you are running tests inside an already existing project, then dependencies will be added directly to your package.json.

The tests folder contains a basic example test to help you get started with testing. For a more detailed example, check out the tests-examples folder, which contains tests written to test a todo app.

Running the Example Test

By default, tests will be run on all three browsers: Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, using three workers. This can be configured in the playwright.config file. Tests are run in headless mode, meaning no browser will open up when running the tests. Results of the tests and test logs will be shown in the terminal.

npx playwright test

Exercises

### HTML Test Reports

After your test completes, an HTML Reporter will be generated, which shows you a full report of your tests allowing you to filter the report by browsers, passed tests, failed tests, skipped tests, and flaky tests. You can click on each test and explore the test's errors as well as each step of the test. By default, the HTML report is opened automatically if some of the tests failed.

```bash
npx playwright show-report

Running the Example Test in UI Mode

Run your tests with UI Mode for a better developer experience with time travel debugging, watch mode, and more.

npx playwright test --ui

Updating Playwright

To update Playwright to the latest version run the following command:

npm install -D @playwright/test@latest
# Also download new browser binaries and their dependencies:
npx playwright install --with-deps

You can always check which version of Playwright you have by running the following command:

npx playwright --version

System Requirements

  • Node.js 18+
  • Windows 10+, Windows Server 2016+ or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
  • MacOS 12 Monterey, MacOS 13 Ventura, or MacOS 14 Sonoma.
  • Debian 11, Debian 12, Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu 22.04, with x86-64 or arm64 architecture.

What's Next

  • Write tests using web-first assertions, page fixtures, and locators
  • Run single test, multiple tests, headed mode
  • Generate tests with Codegen
  • See a trace of your tests
**Tip:** When writing UI tests with Playwright, remember to cover various scenarios and edge cases to ensure robust testing of your web application.