Inspector
Playwright Inspector is a GUI tool that helps authoring and debugging Playwright scripts.

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Open Playwright InspectorThere are several ways of opening Playwright Inspector:
Set the
PWDEBUG
environment variable to run your scripts in debug mode. This configures Playwright for debugging and opens the inspector.Additional useful defaults are configured when
PWDEBUG
is set:- Browsers launch in the headed mode
- Default timeout is set to 0 (= no timeout)
Call page.pause() method from your script when running in headed browser.
- Sync
- Async
Use
open
orcodegen
commands in the Playwright CLI:
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Stepping through the Playwright scriptWhen PWDEBUG
is set, Playwright Inspector window will be opened and the script will be paused on the first Playwright statement:

Now we know what action is about to be performed and we can look into the details on that action. For example, when stopped on an input action such as click
, the exact point Playwright is about to click is highlighted with the large red dot on the inspected page:

By the time Playwright has paused on that click action, it has already performed actionability checks that can be found in the log:

If actionability can't be reached, it'll show action as pending:

You can step over each action using the "Step over" action or resume script without further pauses:

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Debugging Selectors- Click the Explore button to hover over elements in the screen and click them to automatically generate selectors for those elements.
- To verify where selector points, paste it into the inspector input field:

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Recording scriptsAt any moment, clicking Record action enables recorder (codegen) mode. Every action on the target page is turned into the generated script:

You can copy entire generated script or clear it using toolbar actions.