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Trace viewer

Playwright Trace Viewer is a GUI tool that helps you explore recorded Playwright traces after the script has ran. You can open traces locally or in your browser on trace.playwright.dev.

Viewing the trace

You can open the saved trace using Playwright CLI or in your browser on trace.playwright.dev.

playwright show-trace trace.zip

Actions

Once trace is opened, you will see the list of actions Playwright performed on the left hand side:

Trace Viewer Actions Tab

Selecting each action reveals:

  • action snapshots,
  • action log,
  • source code location,
  • network log for this action

In the properties pane you will also see rendered DOM snapshots associated with each action.

Metadata

See metadata such as the time the action was performed, what browser engine was used, what the viewport was and if it was mobile and how many pages, actions and events were recorded.

Trace Viewer Metadata Tab

Screenshots

When tracing with the screenshots option turned on, each trace records a screencast and renders it as a film strip:

Playwright Trace viewer > Film strip

You can hover over the film strip to see a magnified image of for each action and state which helps you easily find the action you want to inspect.

Playwright Trace viewer magnify

Snapshots

When tracing with the snapshots option turned on, Playwright captures a set of complete DOM snapshots for each action. Depending on the type of the action, it will capture:

TypeDescription
BeforeA snapshot at the time action is called.
ActionA snapshot at the moment of the performed input. This type of snapshot is especially useful when exploring where exactly Playwright clicked.
AfterA snapshot after the action.

Here is what the typical Action snapshot looks like:

Playwright Trace Viewer > Snapshots

Notice how it highlights both, the DOM Node as well as the exact click position.

Call

See what action was called, the time and duration as well as parameters, return value and log.

Trace Viewer Call Tab

Console

See the console output for the action where you can see console logs or errors.

Trace Viewer Console Tab

Network

See any network requests that were made during the action.

Trace Viewer Network Tab

Source

See the source code for your entire test.

Trace Viewer Source Tab

Recording a trace

Traces can be recorded using the browser_context.tracing API as follows:

browser = chromium.launch()
context = browser.new_context()

# Start tracing before creating / navigating a page.
context.tracing.start(screenshots=True, snapshots=True, sources=True)

page.goto("https://playwright.dev")

# Stop tracing and export it into a zip archive.
context.tracing.stop(path = "trace.zip")

This will record the trace and place it into the file named trace.zip.

Viewing the trace

You can open the saved trace using Playwright CLI or in your browser on trace.playwright.dev.

playwright show-trace trace.zip

Using trace.playwright.dev

trace.playwright.dev is a statically hosted variant of the Trace Viewer. You can upload trace files using drag and drop.

Drop Playwright Trace to load

Viewing remote traces

You can open remote traces using it's URL. They could be generated on a CI run which makes it easy to view the remote trace without having to manually download the file.

playwright show-trace https://example.com/trace.zip

You can also pass the URL of your uploaded trace (e.g. inside your CI) from some accessible storage as a parameter. CORS (Cross-Origin Resource Sharing) rules might apply.

https://trace.playwright.dev/?trace=https://demo.playwright.dev/reports/todomvc/data/cb0fa77ebd9487a5c899f3ae65a7ffdbac681182.zip