Advanced installation
- Managing browser binaries
- Download from artifact repository
- Skip browser downloads
- Download single browser binary
#
Managing browser binariesEach version of Playwright needs specific versions of browser binaries to operate. By default Playwright downloads Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers into the OS-specific cache folders:
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\ms-playwright
on Windows~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright
on MacOS~/.cache/ms-playwright
on Linux
These browsers will take few hundreds of megabytes of the disk space when installed:
You can override default behavior using environment variables. When installing Playwright, ask it to download browsers into a specific location:
When running Playwright scripts, ask it to search for browsers in a shared location:
Or you can opt into the hermetic install and place binaries under the node_modules/
folder:
Playwright keeps track of packages that need those browsers and will garbage collect them as you update Playwright to the newer versions.
NOTE Developers can opt-in in this mode via exporting
PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=$HOME/pw-browsers
in their.bashrc
.
#
Download from artifact repositoryBy default, Playwright downloads browsers from Microsoft and Google public CDNs.
Sometimes companies maintain an internal artifact repository to host browser
binaries. In this case, Playwright can be configured to download from a custom
location using the PLAYWRIGHT_DOWNLOAD_HOST
env variable.
It is also possible to use a per-browser download hosts using PLAYWRIGHT_CHROMIUM_DOWNLOAD_HOST
, PLAYWRIGHT_FIREFOX_DOWNLOAD_HOST
and PLAYWRIGHT_WEBKIT_DOWNLOAD_HOST
env variables that
take precedence over PLAYWRIGHT_DOWNLOAD_HOST
.
#
Skip browser downloadsIn certain cases, it is desired to avoid browser downloads altogether because browser binaries are managed separately.
This can be done by setting PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD
variable before installation.
#
Download single browser binaryPlaywright ships three packages that bundle only a single browser:
NOTE All configuration environment variables also apply to these packages.
Using these packages is as easy as using a regular Playwright:
Install a specific package
Require package