playwright/docs/src/troubleshooting.md

id	title
troubleshooting	Troubleshooting

Browser dependencies

Playwright does self-inspection every time it runs to make sure the browsers can be launched successfully. If there are missing dependencies, playwright will print instructions to acquire them.

See also in the Command line tools which has a command to install all necessary dependencies automatically for Ubuntu LTS releases.

Code transpilation issues

• langs: js

If you are using a JavaScript transpiler like babel or TypeScript, calling evaluate() with an async function might not work. This is because while playwright uses Function.prototype.toString() to serialize functions while transpilers could be changing the output code in such a way it's incompatible with playwright.

Some workarounds to this problem would be to instruct the transpiler not to mess up with the code, for example, configure TypeScript to use latest ECMAScript version ("target": "es2018"). Another workaround could be using string templates instead of functions:

await page.evaluate(`(async() => {
   console.log('1');
})()`);

Node.js requirements

• langs: js

Playwright requires Node.js version 14 or above

ReferenceError: URL is not defined

Playwright requires Node.js 14 or higher.

Unknown file extension ".ts"

Running TypeScript tests in "type": "module" project requires Node.js 16 or higher.

Incompatible Microsoft Edge / Google Chrome policy settings

It's known that Playwright is not working as expected when some Microsoft Edge / Google Chrome policy settings are set. The following shows some of them, there might be more that affect Playwright's functionalities. If you find any other policy settings that break functionality, please file an issue and we'll add it to this document. You can see a list of applied policies by running chrome://policy in the browser.

• UserDataDir - This policy is used to specify the location of the user data directory. Playwright uses a temporary directory for user data, so this policy is not compatible with Playwright. See discussion in this bug.
• ExtensionInstallForcelist - This policy is used to specify a list of extensions that should be installed. Playwright's browser close will not work if this policy is set. See discussion in this bug.

.NET requirements

• langs: csharp

Playwright is distributed as a .NET Standard 2.0 library. We recommend .NET 6 or newer.

Python requirements

• langs: python

Playwright requires Python 3.7 or newer.

Java requirements

• langs: java

Playwright requires Java 8 or newer.

WebKit Web Inspector

Launching WebKit Inspector during the execution will prevent the Playwright script from executing any further and will reset pre-configured user agent and device emulation.

This is a known limitation.

System requirements

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 11 (Big Sur) or above.

Linux

Depending on your Linux distribution, you might need to install additional dependencies to run the browsers.

:::note Only Ubuntu 18.04, 20.04, and 22.04 are officially supported. :::

See also in the Command line tools which has a command to install all necessary dependencies automatically for Ubuntu LTS releases.