Playwright Automation Starter Repo

Most Playwright starters focus on testing, but testing is just a fraction of Playwright's full power. For example, with Playwright, you can:

Crawl and scrape dynamic websites.
Generate images and PDFs from and HTML/CSS.
Automate repetitive tasks that don't have APIs.
Trigger realtime notifications from website changes.
Record videos that are always up-to-date with your app.
Give your AI agents access to the web.
And much, much more.

This starter focuses on the true power of Playwright: automation. It even addresses the most challenging part of using Playwright for automation--hosting headless browsers in the cloud.

The repo is ready for anything. Just clone and go.

Features:

Playwright for top-shelf browser automation.
Typescript for type safety.
dotenv and dotenv-cli for environment config.
BrowserCat for easy, fast, and affordable headless browser hosting (with a purr-fect free plan).

Getting Started

1. Create Your Automation Project

First, clone the starter repo:

git clone https://github.com/browsercat/playwright-automation-starter.git automation-starter
cd automation-starter
git remote rm origin

Next, install your dependencies:

npm install
npx playwright install

2. Run Your Script Locally

Run the sample automation with the following:

npm run dev

Whoa, you scraped the BrowserCat website! Nice! And you generated an image, a PDF, and a video in ./.output. Sweet.

To tweak the behavior, edit src/automate.ts. And watch for changes with:

npm run dev:watch

3. Run Your Script in the Cloud

In the previous step, you ran the script locally, using local headless browsers. But managing those browsers in the cloud is a huge pain.

Thankfully, the starter repo is pre-configured to run your code on BrowserCat's browser cloud, then send the response back to your computer.

To enable this behavior, sign up for a forever-free plan, then create an API key.

Store the key in your .env file...

mv .env.default .env

BROWSERCAT_API_KEY={YOUR_API_KEY}

With your API key in place, you can run your commands in the cloud:

npm run dev:bcat
npm run dev:bcat:watch

💡 When to use BrowserCat vs. local browsers

In local development and at small scale, running a local browser will be faster. But BrowserCat really shines when:

You need to deploy your code.

Or you need to run lots of simultaneous requests.

Or you need to target a specific geographic region.

Or you need to test in a production setting.

Save your BrowserCat credits for when you need them. They're cheap, but it's better to be frugal.

4. Test Your Scripts

E2E testing is ready to go! Run the suite once or in watch mode:

npm run test
npm run test:watch

Or run the tests in the cloud:

npm run test:bcat
npm run test:bcat:watch

Remember to configure tests in your CI/CD pipeline. Never merge or deploy bad code.

5. Speed Up Your CI/CD Tests

BrowserCat can make your CI/CD tests faster and more reliable. How?

CI/CD containers are often tiny, low-memory, and low-CPU. This is great for keeping costs down, but it's not great for downloading and running headless browsers.

We've seen users cut their CI/CD from over an hour to under 10 minutes just by adding BrowserCat to the mix.

A github workflow is included in your starter. To use it:

Create a Github repo
Store your BrowserCat API key in

> {YOUR_REPO} 
  > Settings (tab) 
    > Secrets and variables (sidebar)
      > Actions 
        > New repository secret (button)
            Name: BROWSERCAT_API_KEY
            Secret: {YOUR_API_KEY}

Link your repo, and push your code:

git remote add origin {YOUR_REPO_URL}
git push --set-upstream origin main # or master

View the results at

> {YOUR_REPO} 
  > Actions (tab)
    > Run tests (sidebar)

💡 BrowserCat and CI/CD

The value of using BrowserCat for CI/CD scales with your usage. We can parallelize your tests far better than any deployment platform.

6. Automate Everything!

Keep growing your powers with Playwright and BrowserCat. Browser automation is a rare and powerful skill, and increasingly moreso as the web grows increasingly complex and siloed.

Here are some resources to help you along the way: