How to run Playwright on GitHub Actions

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Running Playwright on GitHub Actions is fairly straightforward at first glance, however it becomes a bit more tricky when you don’t want to download the whole browser binary zoo on every single CI build.

Looking around a bit on how to go about caching these, I came across various approaches listed in this GitHub issue on the Playwright repo. Below is the result of reading through most of them and figuring out what works best for me and my use case (OctoPrint’s E2E tests, npm based test project).

These steps make sure to install Playwright, fetching the browser binaries from cache if possible, in any case installing the OS depencies, running the tests (replace ./path/to/tests accordingly for your setup) and finally upload the generated report as artifact, regardless of whether the tests succeeded or not:

# Run npm ci and get Playwright version
- name: 🏗 Prepare Playwright env
  working-directory: ./path/to/tests
  run: |
    npm ci
    PLAYWRIGHT_VERSION=$(npm ls --json @playwright/test | jq --raw-output '.dependencies["@playwright/test"].version')
    echo "PLAYWRIGHT_VERSION=$PLAYWRIGHT_VERSION" >> $GITHUB_ENV

# Cache browser binaries, cache key is based on Playwright version and OS
- name: 🧰 Cache Playwright browser binaries
  uses: actions/cache@v3
  id: playwright-cache
  with:
    path: "~/.cache/ms-playwright"
    key: "${{ runner.os }}-playwright-${{ env.PLAYWRIGHT_VERSION }}"
    restore-keys: |
      ${{ runner.os }}-playwright-

# Install browser binaries & OS dependencies if cache missed
- name: 🏗 Install Playwright browser binaries & OS dependencies
  if: steps.playwright-cache.outputs.cache-hit != 'true'
  working-directory: ./path/to/tests
  run: |
    npx playwright install --with-deps

# Install only the OS dependencies if cache hit
- name: 🏗 Install Playwright OS dependencies
  if: steps.playwright-cache.outputs.cache-hit == 'true'
  working-directory: ./path/to/tests
  run: |
    npx playwright install-deps

- name: 🚀 Run Playwright
  working-directory: ./path/to/tests
  run: |
    npx playwright test

- name: ⬆ Upload report
  uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3
  if: always()
  with:
    name: playwright-report
    path: tests/playwright/playwright-report

Github Actions on foosel.net

How to run Playwright on GitHub Actions