Skip to content

Playwright

Playwright Resources

Resources, tips, and patterns for Playwright test automation. My current stack at Optilogic is Python + Pytest + Playwright, though I also have experience with TypeScript from side projects at TestOut.

Why Playwright Over Selenium?

Playwright solves most of Selenium's reliability problems out of the box:

  • Auto-waiting — Playwright waits for elements to be actionable before interacting. No more WebDriverWait boilerplate everywhere.
  • Network interception — Built-in request mocking and API testing support.
  • Multi-browser — Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit from one API.
  • Trace & video — Full test traces and video recording for post-mortem debugging.
  • Fixtures — Pytest fixtures make setup/teardown clean and composable.

Setup (Python + Pytest)

pip install pytest-playwright
playwright install

Basic project structure:

tests/
├── conftest.py       # shared fixtures
├── pages/            # page objects
│   └── login_page.py
└── test_login.py

Page Object Pattern

Playwright works great with the Page Object Model. Pages wrap page (the Playwright Page object) and expose actions.

# pages/login_page.py
class LoginPage:
    def __init__(self, page):
        self.page = page
        self.username = page.get_by_label("Username")
        self.password = page.get_by_label("Password")
        self.submit = page.get_by_role("button", name="Login")

    def login(self, user, pw):
        self.username.fill(user)
        self.password.fill(pw)
        self.submit.click()

# test_login.py
def test_login_success(page):
    login = LoginPage(page)
    page.goto("https://example.com/login")
    login.login("testuser", "password123")
    expect(page).to_have_url("https://example.com/dashboard")

Fixtures with conftest.py

Pytest fixtures are how you share state (browser, page, auth) across tests cleanly.

# conftest.py
import pytest
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright

@pytest.fixture(scope="session")
def browser_context():
    with sync_playwright() as p:
        browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
        context = browser.new_context()
        yield context
        browser.close()

@pytest.fixture
def page(browser_context):
    page = browser_context.new_page()
    yield page
    page.close()

The pytest-playwright plugin provides these out of the box — you usually only need custom fixtures for things like pre-authenticated contexts.

Common Operations

Click: 

page.get_by_role("button", name="Submit").click()

Fill a field: 

page.get_by_label("Email").fill("user@example.com")

Select from dropdown: 

page.get_by_label("Country").select_option("US")

Assert text: 

from playwright.sync_api import expect
expect(page.get_by_role("heading")).to_have_text("Dashboard")

Wait for navigation: 

with page.expect_navigation():
    page.get_by_role("button", name="Login").click()

API Testing with Playwright

Playwright has a built-in APIRequestContext for making HTTP requests — useful for test setup/teardown or pure API tests alongside UI tests.

def test_api_response(playwright):
    api = playwright.request.new_context(base_url="https://api.example.com")
    response = api.get("/users/1")
    assert response.status == 200
    body = response.json()
    assert body["id"] == 1

See the API Testing page for more.

GitHub Actions CI/CD

At Optilogic I built the test pipeline with GitHub Actions. Basic workflow:

name: Playwright Tests
on: [push, pull_request]

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-python@v5
        with:
          python-version: '3.12'
      - name: Install dependencies
        run: pip install -r requirements.txt
      - name: Install browsers
        run: playwright install --with-deps chromium
      - name: Run tests
        run: pytest tests/ --tb=short

Debugging Tips

  • Use page.pause() to drop into Playwright Inspector mid-test during local debugging.
  • Run with --headed to watch the browser: pytest --headed
  • Generate a trace on failure and open with playwright show-trace trace.zip
  • PWDEBUG=1 pytest enables inspector mode automatically