HTML Report Overview

When to Use

When VR tests fail (or pass with retries), and you need to see what changed and why.

The Playwright HTML report is a self-contained static HTML bundle generated by @playwright/test after a test run. It contains:

index.html — the SPA entry point
A data/ (and resources/ / trace/) folder with attachments: screenshots (expected, actual, diff PNGs from toHaveScreenshot), ad-hoc page.screenshot() images, videos (.webm), trace archives (trace.zip), console logs, network logs
All JS/CSS bundled in — no external CDN required

Open from disk or any static host — but traces need a real HTTP server, so use show-report (see Viewing).

Reporter	When
`html`	Triage VR diffs, browse traces — the canonical post-run artifact
`list`	Streaming line-per-test in terminal — local dev flow
`line`	Single updating terminal line — minimal CI logs
`dot`	One char per test — very large suites
`json`	Machine-readable — custom dashboards
`junit`	Required by Jenkins, Bamboo, Azure DevOps, GitLab test tab
`github`	GitHub Actions inline annotations on PR diff
`blob`	Sharded runs — merge later with `playwright merge-reports`

For VR, always include html. Combine with others for CI integration; never replace.

Using list only and trying to triage VR from terminal — no diff viewer; impossible to scrub a slider
Skipping html because reports "take up space" — they're regeneratable; the developer time saved on triage dwarfs the disk cost