1. Overview

Playwright was explicitly created 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.

1.1. Prerequisites

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.

Maven is written in Java. So, to run Maven, we need a system that has Java installed and configured properly. For example, we can download an OS-compatible Java JDK from Oracle’s download site.  It’s recommended to install it on a pathname without spaces.

Once Java is installed, we need to ensure that the commands from the Java JDK are in our PATH environment variable.

2. Installation

To install Maven on Windows, we head over to the Apache Maven site to download the latest version and select the Maven zip file, for example, apache-maven-3.8.4-bin.zip.

Then, we unzip it to the folder where we want Maven to live.

We add both M2_HOME and MAVEN_HOME variables to the Windows environment using system properties and point them to our Maven folder.

Then, we update the PATH variable by appending the Maven bin folder — %M2_HOME%\bin — so that we can run the Maven command everywhere.

2.1 Playwright installation

Create a new maven project in any IDE of your choice and open the pom.xml file

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
      <groupId>com.microsoft.playwright</groupId>
      <artifactId>playwright</artifactId>
      <version>1.31.0</version>
    </dependency>
</dependencies>

Add the above in the pom.xml file
Then create a class App.java under the main/java

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());
            }
        }
}

Now run this class by right-clicking and selecting Run App.main

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