What is Playwright? Tutorial, Use Cases, Definition

Playwright is an open-source testing and automation framework that can automate web browser interactions. To put it simply, you can write code that can open a browser. This makes it very suitable for running all kinds of test scenarios – Playwright’s automation scripts support modern web apps by simulating user interactions such as clicks, typing, and navigation. Not to mention, this tool can work with multiple pages at the same time, without getting blocked or having to wait for operations to complete in any of them.

Playwright enables developers to automate tasks in web browsers like Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit (Safari) with ease. Some of its standout features include cross-browser compatibility, robust debugging tools, and support for headless operation. It also handles dynamic web content seamlessly, making it ideal for web scraping, performance testing, and accessibility checks. 

With support for JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Java, and C#, Playwright is highly versatile – and this is how you can use it for your own web automation tasks.

Playwright Use Cases for Web Automation

Playwright is a powerful tool for browser automation tests – that’s what makes it so popular. It offers extensive cross-browser support and developer-friendly features. It allows to write UI, API, and performance tests all within the same framework – and while the use cases for this tool are plenty, there are a few very important ones:

Broad compatibility and cross browser testing

Playwright offers seamless support for multiple browsers, including Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit (Safari), enabling developers to ensure consistent performance and functionality across different environments while reaching a broader audience. With the ability to create a brand new browser profile for each Playwright test, developers can execute all the tests independently, ensuring clean states for every test execution.

End-to-End (E2E) testing

Playwright is designed for resilience, minimizing flaky tests with its auto-wait feature that ensures elements are actionable before interacting with them. Its web-first assertions and built-in retry logic ensure tests are reliable without needing manual timeouts. With the ability to simulate real user interactions, such as clicks, typing, and navigation, Playwright supports comprehensive end-to-end test execution, helping developers validate complex workflows and critical user journeys across every stage of an application.

Web scraping of dynamic content

Playwright’s ability to handle JavaScript-heavy, single-page applications (SPAs) makes it an essential tool for web scraping, especially for websites with dynamically loaded content. Using independent tests, developers can interact with complex elements and extract data efficiently. The framework also supports multiple tabs, enabling concurrent scrapers in a browser context, which significantly improves efficiency and reliability during test execution.

Robust debugging and tools

With features like the Playwright Inspector, Codegen, and Trace Viewer, developers can effortlessly debug and improve their tests. Playwright also allows for capturing test execution screencast videos, screenshots, and DOM snapshots during failures, making it easier to identify the root cause of test failure. These tools enable a complete capture execution trace, giving developers valuable insights into the lifecycle of Playwright tests.

Advanced testing scenarios

Playwright enables advanced test scenarios, such as those involving multiple tabs, shadow DOM interaction, and API integration. Tests are run in browser context environments, ensuring isolated and reliable setups. Developers can pair browser automation tests with UI validations or even localization checks. Additionally, the support for test execution with real browser input pipeline ensures all the workflows mimic genuine user actions for high accuracy.

How to Setup and Use Playwright with JavaScript?

Playwright was originally built on Node.js, making JavaScript and TypeScript the most compatible languages for this tool. Knowing its strengths and the broad appeal, this is how you can set up and use Playwright with JavaScript. 

Start off by creating a project folder and installing the needed npm packages. Open up a terminal and launch these commands:

mkdir playwright_showcase

cd playwright_showcase

npm init -y 

npm install playwright

npm install @playwright/test

This will create us a directory named playwright_showcase and install the playwright library along with specific browser bindings. With the setup nearly complete, let’s create a dedicated space for our test file. Inside the same directory, make a folder called tests by running mkdir tests. This is where all your test scripts will live.

With the project set up, it’s time to dive into writing some tests. In this tutorial, we’ll create a straightforward test to verify the consistency of product data on a webpage. Specifically, we’ll visit https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/products and check if the product titles match the alt attributes of their corresponding images.

Take a look at the screenshot below. By inspecting the page using your browser’s developer tools, you can see that each product title aligns with the alt attribute of its image. Our test will automate this validation to ensure everything matches perfectly.

However, to check it automatically, the code could look something like this:

import { test, expect } from '@playwright/test';

test('Validate product image alt attribute matches title', async ({ page }) => {
 await page.goto('https://sandbox.oxylabs.io/products');
 const productCards = await page.$$('.product-card');

 for (const product of productCards) {
   const title = await product.$eval('.title', (el) => el.textContent.trim());
   const alt = await product.$eval('img.image', (el) => el.alt);
   const formattedTitle = title.replace(/\s+/g, '_');
   console.log('comparing: ' + alt + ' and ' + formattedTitle)
   expect(alt).toBe(formattedTitle);
 }
});

The code above will open up our E-Commerce sandbox, retrieves all product elements using the .product-card selector, and iterates through them to ensure each product title matches the alt attribute of its corresponding image.

To run this test, save the code in a file within the tests folder we created earlier. Make sure the filename ends with .spec.js or .test.js – this is a requirement for the Playwright framework to identify test files. Once saved, you can execute the test by running the following command in your terminal:

npx playwright test

Afterwards, we can explore execution logs:

This test showcases how Playwright simplifies verifying UI elements by automating browser actions, ensuring product titles and image alt attributes align perfectly.

How to use Playwright with proxies?

In general, for most web automation or testing tasks that are straightforward and involve accessing publicly available content without rate limits or restrictions, proxies are not necessary. Playwright works perfectly well without proxies, and you can configure it directly to interact with browsers for functional and UI testing. However, there are some cases where you will need to use proxies, especially if it concerns web scraping with Playwright: 

Accessing geo-restricted content – proxies are essential if you need to test or scrape content that is only available in specific regions. By using a proxy server based in the desired location, you can simulate access from that country and verify localization features

Avoiding IP blocking and rate limiting – when automating interactions with certain websites, proxies help distribute requests across different IP addresses. This reduces the risk of IP bans and rate limiting. Additionally, you could try using Web Unblocker to bypass CAPTCHA with Playwright – this tool can automatically select CAPTCHA proxies for you and deal with the proxy management, making web scraping activities go by simpler. 

Simulating real user scenarios – if you’re testing scenarios that involve specific network configurations, proxies can simulate these conditions. This is particularly useful for testing how your application behaves under different network restrictions.

Increasing privacy and anonymity – using proxies can provide a layer of privacy by masking your IP address. This is useful if you want to keep your identity private, for instance, when scraping data from publicly available web resources.

Testing with SOCKS5 or HTTPS proxies – if your application requires the use of SOCKS5 or HTTPS proxies for security or network requirements, Playwright allows you to specify these in the browser configuration to match your production environment.

If this is something you see yourself needing during your automation tasks with Playwright, don’t worry – proxy integration with Playwright is not too difficult at all. 

By adding a few lines of configuration into your JavaScript code, you can route your tests through a proxy server effortlessly. The snippet below demonstrates how to configure a proxy by including it in the test context:

test.use({
 contextOptions: {
   proxy: {
     server: 'http://pr.oxylabs.io:7777', 
     username: 'username', 
     password: 'password', 
   },
 },
});

Once the proxy is set up, we can create a simple test to verify it’s working as intended. The following code visits https://ip.oxylabs.io/location and logs the page content to confirm the proxy is active:

test('Proxy testing', async ({ page }) => {
 await page.goto('https://ip.oxylabs.io/location');
 const body = await page.textContent('body');
 console.log('Page information:', body);
});

When you run this test and explore the execution logs, we can see that our proxy works correctly and successfully intercepts traffic. With this setup, Playwright makes proxy integration both simple and powerful, giving you flexibility for testing in diverse network environments. Take a look yourself:

While this tutorial demonstrated how to integrate Datacenter proxies into Playwright, you might be wondering how other types of proxies could be the most beneficial based on the tasks you’re planning to do with Playwright – whether it’s for testing or web scraping.