Playwright, From Zero
You wrote an end-to-end test. It passed five times, then failed on CI for no reason you can name. You added a sleep(2), it passed, you moved on, and it failed again next week. That's not your fault - it's the tool fighting you. Playwright was built by people who lived that exact pain, and it removes most of it by design.
This guide gets you from nothing to a test suite you actually trust: tests that wait for the right thing automatically, run across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit, and hand you a time-travel recording when something breaks.
How to read this
Read the phases in order the first time. Phase 1 is the mental model - what Playwright is and why auto-waiting locators are the whole point. Phase 2 is the daily loop: writing, running, and debugging tests. Phase 3 is the stuff that bites you in real projects. Type the commands as you go; that's how this sticks.
The phases
- The mental model: a browser you can boss around - what Playwright is, and why auto-waiting kills flakiness.
- The everyday loop: write, run, debug - locators, web-first assertions, codegen, and the trace viewer.
- Production reality: the things that bite - auth state, parallelism, network mocking, CI, and the classic traps.