Javascript

Enhancing Your Playwright Workflow: A Guide to the VSCode Extension

Published Sep 6, 2024

Updated Sep 6, 2024

5 min read

Introduction

In my last post, Quick Guide to Playwright Fixtures: Enhancing Your Tests, I delved into some of the enhancements we've been implementing in our end-to-end (E2E) tests using Playwright. As I refine our testing strategies, I've come across a tool that has quickly become an essential part of my workflow: the Playwright VSCode extension.

If you're like me and constantly looking for ways to streamline testing and debugging, you'll appreciate any tool that can make the process more efficient and enjoyable. That's where this extension comes in. It's not just about writing tests - it's about enhancing the entire development experience. In this post, I'll walk you through getting started with the Playwright VSCode extension, sharing some tips and tricks that have made a real difference in my day-to-day work.

Installing the Extension & Basic Setup

Before diving into the Playwright VSCode extension, it's essential to have Playwright installed on your machine. If you haven't done so already, you can quickly install it by running:

npx playwright install

This command will set up Playwright and ensure all necessary dependencies are installed.

Once Playwright is ready, the VSCode extension will be installed next. Open Visual Studio Code, navigate to the Extensions view by clicking on the Extensions icon in the Activity Bar on the side of the window, and search for “Playwright”. The official extension, ID: ms-playwright.playwright / named: “Playwright Test for VSCode” by Microsoft, should appear at the top of the list. Click "Install," and you're all set.

With the extension installed, you can start leveraging its powerful features to enhance your Playwright testing workflow within VSCode.

Running the Tests and Identifying Outputs

To run a test, simply open the test file in VSCode. The Playwright extension will automatically detect test files and display a "Run" icon next to each test and test suite. You can click on this icon to run individual tests or test suites.

Alternatively, you can run all the tests in your project using the Playwright Test Explorer, accessible from the sidebar.

Once you start running your tests, the extension provides real-time feedback within the editor. You'll see the status of each test - whether it passes, fails, or is skipped - right next to the corresponding test in your code. This immediate feedback loop is incredibly helpful for catching issues as you write your tests.

The output of your tests will be displayed in the VSCode terminal. You'll see detailed information about each test run.

Debugging Step-by-Step

I find debugging particularly useful when a test fails unexpectedly or when I want to verify that certain actions are being performed as intended. Instead of guessing what might be wrong, I can see exactly what's going on in each test step, making debugging a much more straightforward and less frustrating process.

To start debugging, you can easily set a breakpoint in your test file by clicking on the left margin next to the line number where you'd like the execution to pause. Once your breakpoints are in place, you can initiate the debug process by selecting the "Debug" option next to the test you'd like to investigate.

Once the debugger is running, the extension allows you to step through your code, inspect variables, and evaluate expressions - all within VSCode. This real-time insight into your test execution is a game-changer, enabling you to pinpoint issues more effectively and confidently refine your tests.

Using the Pick Locator Tool

Another handy feature is the "Pick Locator" tool. If you've ever struggled with selecting the right element in your tests, this tool can be a time saver. It helps you generate reliable locators by letting you interact directly with the webpage elements you want to target.

To use the Pick Locator tool, click the "Pick Locator" button in the Playwright Test Explorer. This will open a new window where you can navigate to the site you're testing. As you hover over elements on the page, the tool will suggest locators, allowing you to select the most appropriate one for your test.

While the Pick Locator tool is handy, it’s important to ensure that the locators you generate are robust and maintainable. This is especially true when integrating them with the fixtures I discussed in my previous blog post. Combining the proper locators with well-designed fixtures can create more reliable and reusable test setups, ultimately making your E2E tests more efficient.

Conclusion

The Playwright VSCode extension has quickly become indispensable in my development workflow. It significantly enhanced my experience of writing and running Playwright tests.

Whether you’re just starting with Playwright or looking to optimize your existing tests, this extension offers a range of features that can save you time and effort. Combining these tools with thoughtful test design, such as leveraging fixtures, you can create a more efficient and effective testing process.

I hope this guide has given you a good overview of what the Playwright VSCode extension can do and how it can benefit your work. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend giving it a go. And as always, feel free to explore further and experiment with the features that best suit your needs.

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A Look at Playwright Parallelism

A Look at Playwright Parallelism Playwright is an open-source automation library developed by Microsoft, designed for testing web applications across multiple browsers. It enables developers and testers to write scripts that simulate real user actions when interacting with web pages. Playwright supports major browsers like Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, including their headless modes. Recently, it has gained a lot of popularity for its robustness, ease of use, and cross-browser compatibility. In this blog post, we will take a look at one very useful aspect of Playwright: running tests in parallel. Parallelism in Playwright Parallelism in Playwright refers to running multiple test spec files or even test cases within a spec file simultaneously, greatly improving test execution speed. This is achieved by running the tests in worker processes, where each worker process is an OS process, running independently, orchestrated by the test runner. All workers have identical environments, and each starts its own browser instance. Parallel execution is particularly beneficial in continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, reducing overall build and testing times. Playwright's architecture inherently supports parallelism, and most modern test runners integrating with Playwright can leverage this feature. The parallel execution feature makes Playwright a highly efficient tool for large-scale web application testing. Enabling Parallelism By default, if you scaffold the project using npm init playwright@latest, parallelism is already enabled. Assuming that Playwright's configuration includes three browsers and there is a single spec file with two test cases, the total number of tests that Playwright needs to execute is 3x2 = 6. ` Playwright will decide on how many workers to use based on several factors: - Hardware support: Depending on the number of CPU cores and other system resources, the operating system will decide how many processes Playwright can spin up. - The workers property in the playwright.config.ts file. - The --workers argument to the playwright test command. For example, npx playwright test --workers 4. The --workers argument overrides the workers property in the configuration. However, in both cases, the number of workers can go up to the number of processes that Playwright can spin up, as decided by the operating system. Once it has determined the number of workers, and if the number of workers is larger than 1, Playwright will then decide how to split the work between workers. This decision also depends on several factors, such as the number of browsers involved and the granularity of the parallelism, which can be controlled in several ways: - In the test spec file, you can specify whether to run the test cases in parallel. To run tests in parallel, you can invoke test.describe.configure({ mode: 'parallel' }); before your test cases. - Alternatively, you can configure it per project by setting the fullyParallel: true property. - And finally, you can set it globally in the config, using the same property: fullyParallel: true. Therefore, if there is more than one worker and the parallel mode is enabled, Playwright will assign test cases to each worker as they become available. This scenario is ideal because it means that each test is stateless, and the resources are used most efficiently. ` Disabling Parallelism What if, however, the tests are not stateless? Imagine one test changes the global configuration of the app via some sort of administration page, and the configuration affects different parts of the app, like enabling or disabling features. Other tests, which may be testing those features, would be impacted and would report incorrect results. In such cases, you might want to disable parallelism. You can disable any parallelism globally by allowing just a single worker at any time. Following the instructions from the previous sections to configure the number of workers, you can either set the workers: 1 option in the configuration file or pass --workers=1 to the command line. ` Let's have a look at our test output in this case: ` Now, compare the time it took with one worker versus the time it took with four workers. It took 8.2 seconds with one worker compared to only 3.9 seconds with multiple workers. That might be an inefficient usage of resources, of course, especially if you have a large test suite and some of the tests are stateless and can be run without impacting other tests. Tweaking Parallelism If you want some tests not to run in parallel, but still want to utilize your workers, you can do that. Again, following the configuration options from the previous sections, you can annotate the entire spec file with test.describe.configure({ mode: 'serial' }); to have the tests run sequentially in that spec file, or use the fullyParallel: false property to run tests sequentially on the project level, or using the same property to run tests sequentially on the global level. This means you can still split the tests between workers, but the tests would be run sequentially within a worker depending on the configuration. For example, let's set the number of workers to 4, but set fullyParallel: false globally. ` The tests need to be run sequentially, but since each browser instance effectively provides an isolated environment, this means tests cannot impact each other between environments, and they are safe to be executed sequentially within an environment. This means setting fullyParallel: false on the global level is not the same as having workers: 1, since the browsers themselves offer an isolated environment for the tests to run sequentially. However, since we only have 3 environments (3 browsers), we cannot fully utilize 4 workers as we wanted, so the number of workers is 3. Conclusion In conclusion, Playwright's workers are the core of its parallelism capabilities, enabling tests to run concurrently across different environments and browsers with efficiency. Through its many configuration properties, Playwright allows you to configure parallelism at multiple levels, offering a granular approach to optimizing your test runs. Beyond just executing tests in parallel on a single machine, Playwright's parallelism can even extend to splitting work across multiple machines through sharding, significantly enhancing the scalability of your testing. We hope this blog post was useful. For those interested in delving deeper into the world of Playwright and its powerful features, we've also recently released a JS Drop titled Awesome Web Testing with Playwright, and we also hosted Debbie O'Brien from Microsoft in a Modern Web episode....

Mar 20, 2024

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JavaScriptPlaywrightTesting

Quick Guide to Playwright Fixtures: Enhancing Your Tests

Introduction Following our recent blog post on migrating E2E tests from Cypress to Playwright, we've identified opportunities to enhance our test scripts further. In this guide, we'll delve into the basics of Playwright fixtures, demonstrating their utility and flexibility in test environments. Playwright fixtures are reusable components that set up and tear down the environment or conditions necessary for tests. They are crucial for writing clean, maintainable, and scalable tests. Fixtures can handle tasks like opening a browser, initializing a database, or logging into an application—actions you might need before running your tests. As a practical example, we'll revisit one of the tests from our previous post, enhancing it with a new fixture to streamline the testing process and significantly improve maintainability. This post is designed to provide the foundational skills to integrate fixtures into your testing workflows effectively, giving you the confidence to manage and maintain your test scripts more efficiently. Creating Our First Fixture To illustrate the power of fixtures in Playwright, let’s consider a practical example from a test scenario in our project. Below is a snippet of a test case from our newsletter page: ` This test scenario navigates to the newsletter page, fills in an email, submits the form, and checks for a success message. To optimize our test suite, we'll refactor common actions like navigation, form completion, and submission into reusable fixtures. This approach makes our tests cleaner and more maintainable and reduces redundancy across similar test scenarios. Implementing the Fixture Here’s how the fixture looks: ` This fixture encapsulates the actions of navigating to the page, filling out the email field, and submitting the form. By abstracting these actions, we simplify and focus our test cases. Refactoring the Test With the fixture in place, let’s see how it changes our original test file: ` A beforeEach method to reset the state of the NewsletterPage fixture ensures a clean and consistent environment for each test scenario. This practice is crucial for maintaining the integrity and reliability of your tests. By leveraging the NewsletterPage fixture, each test within the "Newsletter page" suite starts with a clean and pre-configured environment. This setup improves test clarity and efficiency and aligns with best practices for scalable test architecture. Conclusion As we've seen, fixtures are powerful tools that help standardize test environments, reduce code redundancy, and ensure that each test operates in a clean state. By abstracting common setup and teardown tasks into fixtures, we can focus our testing efforts on what matters most, verifying the behavior and reliability of the software we're developing. Remember, the key to successful test management is choosing the right tools and using them wisely to create scalable, maintainable, and robust testing frameworks. Playwright fixtures offer a pathway towards achieving these goals, empowering teams to build better software faster and more confidently....

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Ensuring Accurate Workflow Status in GitHub for Enhanced Visibility

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Paul McCollum, author of "Practical Salesforce Architecture", shares his journey from microbiology to tech, discussing his work at Nortel Networks, and his transition into enterprise architecture with Salesforce. They explore the importance of empathy in engineering, how user-centric design motivates developers, and the evolution of agile development. Paul emphasizes solving real user problems over technical tasks and how continuous learning keeps work exciting. Chapters 1. Introduction – [00:00:00] 2. Early Career & Transition into Tech – [00:00:58] 3. The Evolution of Technology Stacks – [00:03:15] 4. Learning Through Play & Empathy – [00:04:52] 5. Agile Development & Challenges – [00:18:51] 6. Value-Driven Software Development – [00:21:23] 7. Avoiding Burnout in Tech Careers – [00:25:42] 8. Conclusion – [00:36:17] Follow Paul McCollum on Social Media Paul McCollum Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/realpaulmccollum/ Paul McCollum Twitter: https://x.com/uxaholic...

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Enhancing Your Playwright Workflow: A Guide to the VSCode Extension

Introduction

Installing the Extension & Basic Setup

Running the Tests and Identifying Outputs

Debugging Step-by-Step

Using the Pick Locator Tool

Conclusion

William Mimura

You might also like

A Look at Playwright Parallelism

Quick Guide to Playwright Fixtures: Enhancing Your Tests

Ensuring Accurate Workflow Status in GitHub for Enhanced Visibility

How User-Centric Design Motivates Developers with Paul McCollum

Let's innovate together!

You might also like

A Look at Playwright Parallelism

Quick Guide to Playwright Fixtures: Enhancing Your Tests

Ensuring Accurate Workflow Status in GitHub for Enhanced Visibility

How User-Centric Design Motivates Developers with Paul McCollum