CI

Playwright · Reference cheat sheet

📋 Overview

Run Playwright headlessly in CI with browser deps, artifacts (report, trace, video), sharding, and a started app via webServer or job services.

🔧 Core concepts

💡 Examples

GitHub Actions (sketch):

- uses: actions/checkout@v4
- uses: actions/setup-node@v4
  with: { node-version: 22 }
- run: npm ci
- run: npx playwright install --with-deps
- run: npx playwright test
  env:
    CI: true
- uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
  if: always()
  with:
    name: playwright-report
    path: playwright-report/

Config CI guards:

forbidOnly: !!process.env.CI,
retries: process.env.CI ? 2 : 0,
workers: process.env.CI ? 2 : undefined,
reporter: process.env.CI
  ? [['github'], ['html'], ['list']]
  : [['list'], ['html']],

Docker:

docker run --rm -v $PWD:/work -w /work mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1.49.0-jammy \
  /bin/bash -c "npm ci && npx playwright test"

Pin image tag to the same Playwright version as package.json.

Shard matrix: strategy.matrix.shard: [1, 2, 3] + --shard=$\{\{ matrix.shard \}\}/3.

⚠️ Pitfalls

• Missing --with-deps on Ubuntu → browser launch errors.
• Not uploading artifacts on failure (if: always()).
• Snapshot baselines from a different OS than CI.
• Starting the app twice (webServer + manual job step).
• Secrets in logs from DEBUG=pw:api in CI.

🔗 Related

• Install
• Config
• Parallel
• Tracing
• Visual comparisons
• Authentication