Playwright (Drupal)

Goal

Playwright drives a real browser against a running site and reports what happened — a page that did not load, a form that did not submit, a screenshot that does not match a baseline. It is the one tool behind two process recipes: drupal/e2e-setup-atk.md runs it against user journeys, and drupal/visual-regression-setup.md runs it against rendered pages. Both name this recipe as their playwright tooling dependency, so it installs and runs the same way for either.

@playwright/test is the package: it carries the playwright CLI, the test runner, and npx playwright install, which downloads the browser binaries separately from the package.

Install

Playwright runs on the host, never inside a container — the site is reached by address, not by being inside the same filesystem as the browser.

npm install --save-dev @playwright/test

npx playwright install chromium

The second step downloads the Chromium binary only; it does not touch system libraries. On a host missing one, the first run against a real page names it, and npx playwright install-deps chromium installs it — that step needs root or sudo on Linux, so it is not run here without a person's consent.

Run

node_modules/.bin/playwright --version

Before the Install step, this is not found and exits non-zero: install, then run it again. After it, it prints the resolved package's version, such as Version 1.63.0, and exits 0. The two process recipes above invoke Playwright as npx playwright … for a real run, because npx resolves the same binary and is the form their own commands take; npx can also resolve a copy outside the project, so node_modules/.bin/playwright is the more reliable proof this project has its own.