Installing Playwright Test Runner

Playwright is an open-source framework developed by Microsoft for web testing and automation. It enables testing on all modern rendering engines, including Chromium, Firefox, and Webkit, with a single API. Playwright enables cross-browser web automation that is reliable, capable, and fast.

Playwright has its own test runner to accommodate end-to-end testing needs.

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Getting Started with Playwright Test Runner

Using init command

• From project’s root directory, run the following command:

npm init playwright@latest

• Choose the default options

• A configuration file, a GitHub Action workflow, and a first test example.spec.ts are created.

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

Manually

• Run the following commands to install dependencies and browsers:

npm i -D @playwright/test
# install supported browsers
npx playwright install

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Installing specific browsers

# to install webkit
npx playwright install webkit

# to install firefox
npx playwright install firefox

# to install chromium
npx playwright install chromium

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Using branded browsers

By default, Playwright uses open-source Chromium builds. That is, if Google Chrome is on version N, then Playwright's latest version supports Chromium N+1, which will be released in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge a few weeks later.

Tip: Always keep Playwright up to date so the tests can catch failures on the upcoming browser version.

However, sometimes there could be a requirement to run the tests against branded browsers. To enable test runs on stable Chrome version, go to `playwright.config.ts` and add a new project to use the chrome channel:

export default defineConfig({
  projects: [
    /* Test against branded browsers. */
    {
      name: 'Google Chrome',
      use: { ...devices['Desktop Chrome'], channel: 'chrome' },
    },
    ...other browsers
  ],
});

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