Getting Started
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InstallationUse npm or Yarn to install Playwright in your Node.js project. Playwright requires Node.js 10 or higher.
During installation, Playwright downloads browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. This sets up your environment for browser automation with just one command. It is possible to modify this default behavior for monorepos and other scenarios. See installation parameters for mode details.
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UsageOnce installed, you can require
Playwright in a Node.js script, and launch any of the 3 browsers (chromium
, firefox
and webkit
).
Playwright APIs are asynchronous and return Promise objects. Our code examples use the async/await pattern to simplify comprehension. The code is wrapped in an unnamed async arrow function which is invoking itself.
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First scriptIn our first script, we will navigate to whatsmyuseragent.org
and take a screenshot in WebKit.
By default, Playwright runs the browsers in headless mode. To see the browser UI, pass the headless: false
flag while launching the browser. You can also use slowMo
to slow down execution.
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System requirementsPlaywright requires Node.js version 10.15 or above. The browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox and WebKit work across the 3 platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux):
- Windows: Works with Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
- macOS: Requires 10.14 or above.
- Linux: Depending on your Linux distribution, you might need to install additional
dependencies to run the browsers.
- Firefox requires Ubuntu 18.04+
- For Ubuntu 18.04, the additional dependencies are defined in our Docker image, which is based on Ubuntu.
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TypeScript IDE supportPlaywright comes with built-in support for TypeScript. Playwright type definitions will be imported automatically.
It is also possible to add these types to your variables manually. In TypeScript:
If you use JavaScript, you can still use TypeScript definitions for improved auto-completions and warnings in Visual Studio Code or WebStorm. Add the following to the top of your JavaScript file:
You can also use JSDoc to set types for variables.