🎭 Playwright CLI

Playwright CLI is utility tool for Playwright. With the CLI, you can:

• Generate code: Record user interactions and generate Playwright scripts.
• Open pages: Open pages in Chromium, Firefox and WebKit (Safari) on all platforms.
  • Emulate devices, color schemes and geolocation.
• Inspect selectors: Use the Playwright DevTools API to inspect selectors.
• Generate page screenshots and PDFs

Usage

$ npx playwright-cli --help

# To save as a dependency
$ npm install -D playwright-cli

Generate code

$ npx playwright-cli codegen wikipedia.org

Run codegen and perform actions in the browser. Playwright CLI will generate JavaScript code for the user interactions. codegen will attempt to generate resilient text-based selectors.

Preserve authenticated state

Run codegen with --save-storage to save cookies and localStorage at the end. This is useful to separately record authentication step and reuse it later.

$ npx playwright-cli --save-storage=auth.json codegen
# Perform authentication and exit.
# auth.json will contain the storage state.

Run with --load-storage to consume previously loaded storage. This way, all cookies and localStorage will be restored, bringing most web apps to the authenticated state.

$ npx playwright-cli --load-storage=auth.json open my.web.app
$ npx playwright-cli --load-storage=auth.json codegen my.web.app
# Perform actions in authenticated state.

Open pages

With open, you can use Playwright bundled browsers to browse web pages. Playwright provides cross-platform WebKit builds that can be used to reproduce Safari rendering across Windows, Linux and macOS.

# Open page in Chromium
npx playwright-cli open example.com

# Open page in WebKit
npx playwright-cli wk example.com

Emulate devices

open can emulate mobile and tablet devices (see all devices).

# Emulate iPhone 11.
npx playwright-cli --device="iPhone 11" open wikipedia.org

Emulate color scheme and viewport size

# Emulate screen size and color scheme.
npx playwright-cli --viewport-size=800,600 --color-scheme=dark open twitter.com

Emulate geolocation, language and timezone

# Emulate timezone, language & location
# Once page opens, click the "my location" button to see geolocation in action
npx playwright-cli --timezone="Europe/Rome" --geolocation="41.890221,12.492348" --lang="it-IT" open maps.google.com

Inspect selectors

During open or codegen, you can use following API inside the developer tools console of any browser.

playwright.$(selector)

Query Playwright selector, using the actual Playwright query engine, for example:

> playwright.$('.auth-form >> text=Log in');

<button>Log in</button>

playwright.$$(selector)

Same as playwright.$, but returns all matching elements.

> playwright.$$('li >> text=John')

> [<li>, <li>, <li>, <li>]

playwright.inspect(selector)

Reveal element in the Elements panel (if DevTools of the respective browser supports it).

> playwright.inspect('text=Log in')

playwright.selector(element)

Generates selector for the given element.

> playwright.selector($0)

"div[id="glow-ingress-block"] >> text=/.*Hello.*/"

Take screenshot

# See command help
$ npx playwright-cli screenshot --help

# Wait 3 seconds before capturing a screenshot after page loads ('load' event fires)
npx playwright-cli \
  --device="iPhone 11" \
  --color-scheme=dark \
  screenshot \
    --wait-for-timeout=3000 \
    twitter.com twitter-iphone.png

# Capture a full page screenshot
npx playwright-cli screenshot --full-page en.wikipedia.org wiki-full.png

Generate PDF

PDF generation only works in Headless Chromium.

# See command help
$ npx playwright-cli pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF wiki.pdf

Known limitations

Opening WebKit Web Inspector will disconnect Playwright from the browser. In such cases, code generation will stop.