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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.

Playwright is distributed as a set of Maven modules. The easiest way to use it is to add one dependency to your project's pom.xml as described below. If you're not familiar with Maven please refer to its documentation.

Usage​

Get started by installing Playwright and running the example file to see it in action.

src/main/java/org/example/App.java
package org.example;

import com.microsoft.playwright.*;

public class App {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try (Playwright playwright = Playwright.create()) {
            Browser browser = playwright.chromium().launch();
            Page page = browser.newPage();
            page.navigate("http://playwright.dev");
            System.out.println(page.title());
        }
    }
}

With the Example.java and pom.xml above, compile and execute your new program as follows:

mvn compile exec:java -D exec.mainClass="org.example.App"

Running it downloads the Playwright package and installs browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox and WebKit. To modify this behavior see installation parameters.

First script​

In our first script, we will navigate to playwright.dev and take a screenshot in WebKit.

package org.example;

import com.microsoft.playwright.*;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

public class App {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    try (Playwright playwright = Playwright.create()) {
      Browser browser = playwright.webkit().launch();
      Page page = browser.newPage();
      page.navigate("https://playwright.dev/");
      page.screenshot(new Page.ScreenshotOptions().setPath(Paths.get("example.png")));
    }
  }
}

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

playwright.firefox().launch(new BrowserType.LaunchOptions().setHeadless(false).setSlowMo(50));

Running the Example script​

mvn compile exec:java -D exec.mainClass="org.example.App"

By default browsers launched with Playwright run headless, meaning no browser UI will open up when running the script. To change that you can pass new BrowserType.LaunchOptions().setHeadless(false) when launching the browser.

System requirements​

  • Java 8 or higher.
  • Windows 10+, Windows Server 2016+ or Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).
  • macOS 13 Ventura, or later.
  • Debian 12, Ubuntu 22.04, Ubuntu 24.04, on x86-64 and arm64 architecture.

What's next​