playwright
Advanced tools
Package description
Playwright is a Node.js library developed by Microsoft that allows developers to automate browser actions for testing and scraping purposes. It supports multiple browsers, including Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, and provides a high-level API to control headless or full browsers over the DevTools Protocol.
Browser Automation
Automate browser actions such as opening a page, clicking elements, and navigating through websites.
const { chromium } = require('playwright');
(async () => {
const browser = await chromium.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
// other actions...
await browser.close();
})();Web Scraping
Extract data from web pages by selecting elements and retrieving their content.
const { firefox } = require('playwright');
(async () => {
const browser = await firefox.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
const data = await page.textContent('.some-element');
console.log(data);
await browser.close();
})();Automated Testing
Write automated tests for web applications, including assertions to validate the behavior of the application.
const { webkit } = require('playwright');
const { expect } = require('@playwright/test');
(async () => {
const browser = await webkit.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
const title = await page.title();
expect(title).toBe('Example Domain');
await browser.close();
})();Cross-Browser Testing
Test web applications across multiple browsers to ensure compatibility and consistent behavior.
const { chromium, firefox, webkit } = require('playwright');
(async () => {
for (const browserType of [chromium, firefox, webkit]) {
const browser = await browserType.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
// Perform tests across different browsers
await browser.close();
}
})();Mobile Emulation
Emulate mobile devices to test responsive designs and touch interactions.
const { chromium, devices } = require('playwright');
const iPhone11 = devices['iPhone 11 Pro'];
(async () => {
const browser = await chromium.launch();
const context = await browser.newContext({
...iPhone11
});
const page = await context.newPage();
await page.goto('https://example.com');
// Emulate mobile device actions and layout
await browser.close();
})();Selenium WebDriver is one of the most well-known browser automation tools. It requires separate drivers for each browser and is generally slower than Playwright due to its reliance on the WebDriver protocol, which is more standardized but less performant.
Puppeteer is another Node.js library that provides a high-level API to control Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It is similar to Playwright but was developed by the Chrome DevTools team and initially focused on Chrome, whereas Playwright supports multiple browsers out of the box.
Cypress is a front-end testing tool built for the modern web. It is both a library for writing tests and a test runner that executes the tests. Cypress is known for its rich interactive test runner interface but does not support as many browsers as Playwright and is primarily focused on testing rather than general browser automation.
Nightwatch.js is an automated testing framework for web applications and websites, written in Node.js and using the W3C WebDriver API. It is designed to simplify the process of writing end-to-end tests. Nightwatch is less feature-rich compared to Playwright and is more focused on the testing aspect.
Readme
| Build | Status |
|---|---|
| Chromium |  |
| Firefox |  |
| WebKit |  |
Playwright is a Node library to automate the Chromium, Webkit and Firefox browsers.
npm i playwright
Playwright can be used to create a browser instance, open pages, and then manipulate them. See API docs for a comprehensive list.
This code snippet navigates to example.com in WebKit, and saves a screenshot.
const pw = require('playwright');
(async () => {
const browser = await pw.playwright('webkit').launch(); // or 'chromium', 'firefox'
const context = await browser.newContext();
const page = await context.newPage();
await page.goto('https://www.example.com/');
await page.screenshot({ path: 'example.png' });
await browser.close();
})();
This code snippet navigates to example.com in Firefox, and executes a script in the page context.
const pw = require('playwright');
(async () => {
const browser = await pw.playwright('firefox').launch(); // or 'chromium', 'webkit'
const context = await browser.newContext();
const page = await context.newPage();
await page.goto('https://www.example.com/');
const dimensions = await page.evaluate(() => {
return {
width: document.documentElement.clientWidth,
height: document.documentElement.clientHeight,
deviceScaleFactor: window.devicePixelRatio
}
})
console.log(dimensions);
await browser.close();
})();
Playwright has code derived from the Puppeteer project, available under the Apache 2.0 license.
Q: What are the goals of Playwright?
Playwright is focused to enable cross-browser web automation scripts that are reliable and fast. Our primary goal with Playwright is to improve automated UI testing by eliminating flakiness and improving the speed of execution.
Q: How does Playwright compare against Puppeteer?
[WIP]
Puppeteer is a Node library to automate the Chromium browser through the Chrome DevTools Protocol. It enables fast, rich and reliable automation scripts for Chromium.
Playwright introduces similar bi-directional protocols for the Firefox and WebKit browsers, extending Puppeteer's capabilities to enable cross-browser automation.
Q: Is Playwright ready?
Playwright is actively developed as we get to feature parity across Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. Progress on each browser can be tracked on the Is Playwright Ready? page, which shows test coverage per browser.
FAQs
A high-level API to automate web browsers
The npm package playwright receives a total of 5,145,652 weekly downloads. As such, playwright popularity was classified as popular.
We found that playwright demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 4 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
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