3.8 KiB
Installation
System requirements
Playwright requires Node.js version 10.15 or above. The browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox and WebKit work across the 3 platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux):
- Windows: Works with Windows and Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
- macOS: Requires 10.14 or above.
- Linux: Depending on your Linux distribution, you might need to install additional
dependencies to run the browsers.
- For Ubuntu 18.04, the additional dependencies are defined in our Docker image, which is based on Ubuntu.
Managing browser binaries
Each version of Playwright needs specific versions of browser binaries to operate.
By default it downloads Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers into the node_modules/
folder. This way no extra steps are needed to get playwright up and running:
npm i playwright
These browsers will take hundreds of megabytes of the disk space when installed:
du -hs ./node_modules/playwright/.local-browsers/*
281M .local-browsers/chromium-XXXXXX
187M .local-browsers/firefox-XXXX
180M .local-browsers/webkit-XXXX
To mitigate that, Playwright has a rich set of options to control browser management.
Download from artifact repository
By default, Playwright downloads browsers from Microsoft and Google public CDNs.
Sometimes companies maintain an internal artifact repository to host browser
binaries. In this case, Playwright can be configured to download from a custom
location using the PLAYWRIGHT_DOWNLOAD_HOST
env variable.
$ PLAYWRIGHT_DOWNLOAD_HOST=192.168.1.78 npm i playwright
Share browser binaries across projects
Often times, developers work with multiple NPM projects that all use Playwright.
By default, every project will have browser binaries in its own node_modules/
folder.
To save the disk space and to speedup installation, Playwright can re-use
these binaries.
Sharing browser binaries is a two-step process:
- When installing Playwright, ask it to download browsers into a shared location:
$ PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=$HOME/pw-browsers npm i playwright
- When running Playwright scripts, ask it to search for browsers in a shared location:
$ PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=$HOME/pw-browsers node playwright-script.js
Note
Developers can opt-in in this mode via exporting
PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=$HOME/pw-browsers
in their.bashrc
.
Skip browser downloads
In certain cases, it is desired to avoid browser downloads altogether because browser binaries are managed separately.
This can be done by setting PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD
variable before installation.
$ PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD=1 npm i playwright
Download single browser binary
Playwright ships three packages that bundle only a single browser:
Note
All configuration environment variables also apply to these packages.
Using these packages is as easy as using a regular Playwright:
- Install a specific package
$ npm i playwright-webkit
- Require package
// Notice a proper package name in require
const { webkit } = require('playwright-webkit');
(async () => {
const browser = await webkit.launch();
// ....
})();