Playwright Watch

Playwright watch is an app that enables visual watch mode for Playwright. Run and visually debug Playwright tests as soon as you hit save.

Installation

npm i -D @deploysentinel/playwright-watch @deploysentinel/playwright

Note: @deploysentinel/playwright-watch requires the @deploysentinel/playwright reporter to be installed to collect run results and trace telemetry. All test data is collected locally and never sent out when using this package.

Usage

npx pw-watch --reporter @deploysentinel/playwright

Additional arguments will be forwarded to playwright test.

Note: Only the last test run will be shown in the visual debugger

Specifing Custom File Pattern

By default, the command watches all files matching **/*.(spec|test).(mjs|mts|ts|js). You can customize the watched file glob by passing in any number of globs into --testMatch. Ex: --testMatch "**/*.spec.js".

Reducing Timeout

When writing tests locally, often you want to fail fast to get results quickly. You can lower the default test timeout (30s) by setting --timeout to a lower value.

Example test timeout to 2 seconds:

npx pw-watch --reporter @deploysentinel/playwright --timeout=2000

This will ensure no test will run longer than 2 seconds. You may need to experiment with an appropriate timeout for your tests. Granular timeout configs (opens in a new tab) can also be set up in Playwright.

Optional: Installing Reporter to Config

To avoid needing to specify --reporter @deploysentinel/playwright when running pw-watch, you can add the DeploySentinel Playwright reporter to your playwright.config.(js|ts) file (opens in a new tab). No API keys are needed when running locally.

Afterwards, you can simply just run npx pw-watch.

Disabling Cross Browser Test Runs

When in watch mode, typically you only want to run the test against 1 configuration (ex. just Chromium). You can use Playwright's --project flag to select only a single project to be run, if your test suite usually runs against multiple browsers.

npx pw-watch --reporter @deploysentinel/playwright  --project=chromium