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Installation

Introduction

Playwright was created specifically to accommodate the needs of end-to-end testing. Playwright supports all modern rendering engines including Chromium, WebKit, and Firefox. Test on Windows, Linux, and macOS, locally or on CI, headless or headed with native mobile emulation.

You can choose to use NUnit base classes or MSTest base classes that Playwright provides to write end-to-end tests. These classes support running tests on multiple browser engines, parallelizing tests, adjusting launch/context options and getting a Page/BrowserContext instance per test out of the box. Alternatively you can use the library to manually write the testing infrastructure.

  1. Start by creating a new project with dotnet new. This will create the PlaywrightTests directory which includes a UnitTest1.cs file:
dotnet new nunit -n PlaywrightTests
cd PlaywrightTests
  1. Install the necessary Playwright dependencies:
dotnet add package Microsoft.Playwright.NUnit
  1. Build the project so the playwright.ps1 is available inside the bin directory:
dotnet build
  1. Install required browsers by replacing netX with the actual output folder name, e.g. net8.0:
pwsh bin/Debug/netX/playwright.ps1 install

If pwsh is not available, you have to install PowerShell.

Add Example Tests

Edit the UnitTest1.cs file with the code below to create an example end-to-end test:

UnitTest1.cs
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;
using System.Threading.Tasks;
using Microsoft.Playwright;
using Microsoft.Playwright.NUnit;
using NUnit.Framework;

namespace PlaywrightTests;

[Parallelizable(ParallelScope.Self)]
[TestFixture]
public class Tests : PageTest
{
[Test]
public async Task HomepageHasPlaywrightInTitleAndGetStartedLinkLinkingtoTheIntroPage()
{
await Page.GotoAsync("https://playwright.dev");

// Expect a title "to contain" a substring.
await Expect(Page).ToHaveTitleAsync(new Regex("Playwright"));

// create a locator
var getStarted = Page.GetByRole(AriaRole.Link, new() { Name = "Get started" });

// Expect an attribute "to be strictly equal" to the value.
await Expect(getStarted).ToHaveAttributeAsync("href", "/docs/intro");

// Click the get started link.
await getStarted.ClickAsync();

// Expects the URL to contain intro.
await Expect(Page).ToHaveURLAsync(new Regex(".*intro"));
}
}

Running the Example Tests

By default tests will be run on Chromium. This can be configured via the BROWSER environment variable, or by adjusting the launch configuration options. Tests are run in headless mode meaning no browser will open up when running the tests. Results of the tests and test logs will be shown in the terminal.

dotnet test -- NUnit.NumberOfTestWorkers=5

See our doc on Test Runners to learn more about running tests in headed mode, running multiple tests, running specific configurations etc.

System requirements

  • Playwright is distributed as a .NET Standard 2.0 library. We recommend .NET 8.
  • Windows 10+, Windows Server 2016+ or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
  • MacOS 12 Monterey, MacOS 13 Ventura, or MacOS 14 Sonoma.
  • Debian 11, Debian 12, Ubuntu 20.04 or Ubuntu 22.04.

What's next