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Getting started - Library

Introduction​

Playwright can either be used with the MSTest or NUnit, or as a Playwright Library (this guide). If you are working on an application that utilizes Playwright capabilities or you are using Playwright with another test runner, read on.

Usage​

Create a console project and add the Playwright dependency.

# Create project
dotnet new console -n PlaywrightDemo
cd PlaywrightDemo

# Add project dependency
dotnet add package Microsoft.Playwright
# Build the project
dotnet build
# Install required browsers - replace netX with actual output folder name, e.g. net8.0.
pwsh bin/Debug/netX/playwright.ps1 install

# If the pwsh command does not work (throws TypeNotFound), make sure to use an up-to-date version of PowerShell.
dotnet tool update --global PowerShell

Create a Program.cs that will navigate to https://playwright.dev/dotnet and take a screenshot in Chromium.

using Microsoft.Playwright;

using var playwright = await Playwright.CreateAsync();
await using var browser = await playwright.Chromium.LaunchAsync();
var page = await browser.NewPageAsync();
await page.GotoAsync("https://playwright.dev/dotnet");
await page.ScreenshotAsync(new()
{
    Path = "screenshot.png"
});

Now run it.

dotnet run

By default, Playwright runs the browsers in headless mode. To see the browser UI, set Headless option to false. You can also use SlowMo to slow down execution. Learn more in the debugging tools section.

await using var browser = await playwright.Firefox.LaunchAsync(new()
{
    Headless = false,
    SlowMo = 50,
});

Using Assertions​

You can do the following to leverage Playwright's web-first assertions when you are using your own test framework. These will automatically retry until the condition is met, e.g. an element has a certain text or the timeout is reached:

using Microsoft.Playwright;
using static Microsoft.Playwright.Assertions;

// Change the default 5 seconds timeout if you'd like.
SetDefaultExpectTimeout(10_000);

using var playwright = await Playwright.CreateAsync();
await using var browser = await playwright.Chromium.LaunchAsync();
var page = await browser.NewPageAsync();
await page.GotoAsync("https://playwright.dev/dotnet");
await Expect(page.GetByRole(AriaRole.Link, new() { Name = "Get started" })).ToBeVisibleAsync();

Bundle drivers for different platforms​

Playwright by default does bundle only the driver for the .NET publish target runtime. If you want to bundle for additional platforms, you can override this behavior by using either all, none or linux, win, osx in your project file.

<PropertyGroup>
  <PlaywrightPlatform>all</PlaywrightPlatform>
</PropertyGroup>

or:

<PropertyGroup>
  <PlaywrightPlatform>osx;linux</PlaywrightPlatform>
</PropertyGroup>