Playwright for Browser Automation

Last week I held a short & sweet presentation in the company about the usage, benefits and drawbacks of Browser Remote Debugging APIs. One unfortunate problem we discovered was the lack of a standard across the browsers; every major browser maintains its very own implementation. The RemoteDebug – Intitiative tried to solve this problem, but until now without noticeable success, as you can see here by the lack of activity. Therefore, the Test and Development – World needed to deal with that all by themselves. A great team of ex Puppeteer-developers, who moved from Google to Microsoft, did exactly that by bringing us Playwright, a framework for writing automated tests encapsulating and using the various Remote Debugging Interfaces. In today’s short example we write a quick example test with Playwright.

Installing Playwright

As a starting prerequisite, we need a NodeJS-Distribution with Version 10 or greater. Next, we go to our already well-filled project directory and create a new NodeJS-Project:

$ cd /path/to/your/project/directory
$ mkdir playwright_test && cd playwright_test
$ npm init
$ npm install --save-dev playwright

While the installation progresses, you will notice that Playwright brings its own browser binaries. Don’t worry about that, they are still perfectly valid, as the rendering engines are not modified at all. Only the debugging capabilities have been given a few extensions.

Alright, that’s all we need.

Time to dive into the code!

Let’s assume we want to buy red shoes on Amazon, because we need new shoes, and red is a nice color.

// 1. We start by initializing and launching a non-headless Firefox 
// for demo purposes.
// (How do you call them, "headful"? "headded"? Feel free to drop me 
// your best shots. :))
const {firefox} = require("playwright");

(async () => {
  const browser = await firefox.launch({headless: false, slowMo: 50});
  const context = await browser.newContext();

  // 2. Next, we head to the Amazon Landing Page...
  const page = await context.newPage();
  await page.goto("https://www.amazon.com");
  
  // 3. ...do the search for Red Shoes...
  await page.fill("#twotabsearchtextbox", "Red Shoes");
  const searchBox = await page.$("#twotabsearchtextbox");
  await searchBox.press("Enter");

  // 4. ...and take a nice deep look at the page 
  // by saving a screenshot.
  await page.waitFor("img[data-image-latency='s-product-image']");
  await page.screenshot({path: "./screenshot.jpg", type: "jpeg"});
  
  // 5. Afterwards, we leave the testrun with a clean state.
  await browser.close();
})();

That’s it for now. From here, we can extend the test by doing elaborate verification steps, check out a nice pair of red shoes and pay them with our hard-earned testing money.  Feel free to check out the example’s full source code from here and go ham.

Conclusion

With Playwright we got a means to write automated tests with ease against the many different Remote Debugging APIs. It copes nicely with the API differences while preserving an intuitive and familiar JS test automation syntax.

So if you are looking for a more lightweight and lower level alternative to Selenium, give it a go!

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