playwright-chromium

What is playwright-chromium?

The playwright-chromium npm package is a Node library that provides a high-level API to automate Chromium-based browsers. It is part of the Playwright project, which is designed for end-to-end testing and web scraping. The package allows you to control a browser, navigate web pages, interact with elements, and capture screenshots, among other functionalities.

What are playwright-chromium's main functionalities?

Browser Automation

This feature allows you to automate browser actions such as navigating to a URL, taking screenshots, and closing the browser.

const { chromium } = require('playwright-chromium');
(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  await page.screenshot({ path: 'example.png' });
  await browser.close();
})();

Web Scraping

This feature allows you to scrape data from web pages by navigating to a URL and extracting information using DOM selectors.

const { chromium } = require('playwright-chromium');
(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  const data = await page.evaluate(() => document.querySelector('h1').innerText);
  console.log(data);
  await browser.close();
})();

Form Submission

This feature allows you to automate form submissions by filling out input fields and clicking buttons.

const { chromium } = require('playwright-chromium');
(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com/login');
  await page.fill('#username', 'myUsername');
  await page.fill('#password', 'myPassword');
  await page.click('button[type="submit"]');
  await browser.close();
})();

Testing

This feature allows you to perform end-to-end testing by navigating to a URL, performing actions, and making assertions.

const { chromium } = require('playwright-chromium');
(async () => {
  const browser = await chromium.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  const title = await page.title();
  console.assert(title === 'Example Domain', 'Title is incorrect');
  await browser.close();
})();

Other packages similar to playwright-chromium

puppeteer

Puppeteer is a Node library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It is similar to playwright-chromium in terms of browser automation and web scraping capabilities. However, Playwright offers broader browser support and more advanced features for handling multiple contexts and parallelism.

selenium-webdriver

Selenium WebDriver is a popular tool for automating web applications for testing purposes. It supports multiple browsers and programming languages. Compared to playwright-chromium, Selenium is more mature but may lack some of the modern features and performance optimizations found in Playwright.

cypress

Cypress is a JavaScript end-to-end testing framework that focuses on making the testing experience more developer-friendly. It provides a rich set of features for testing modern web applications. While Cypress is easier to set up and use, playwright-chromium offers more flexibility and broader browser support.

README

playwright-chromium

This package contains the Chromium flavor of the Playwright library. If you want to write end-to-end tests, we recommend @playwright/test.