How do I roll to a specific browser version with Playwright?

Question

I need to run some tests using Playwright among different Chromium versions. I have different Chromium folders with different versions, but I don't know how to switch from a version to another using the CLI to run my tests. Some help? Thanks :)

Answer 1

You can use the executablePath argument when launching the browser to use a custom executable. See here. Note, that this only works with Chromium based browsers, see here.

const playwright = require('playwright');

(async () => {
  const browser = await playwright.chromium.launch({
    executablePath: '/your/custom/chromium', 
    headless: false, // to see the browser
    slowMo: 4000 // to slow it down
  });
  // example for edge on msft windows 
  // executablePath: 'C:/Program Files (x86)/Microsoft/Edge/Application/msedge.exe',


  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('http://whatsmyuseragent.org/');
  await page.screenshot({ path: `example.png` });
  await browser.close();
})();

Also Playwright does only test against the latest stable version, so other Chromium versions might miss-behave. See here under the releases.

Answer 2

Max Schmitt is right: the library is not guaranteed to work with non-bundled Chromiums. Anyway, you can give it a try to multiple Chromium-based browsers in the executablePath. As it is not builtin in the Playwright Test you will need to implement it yourself.

Note: like this you lose some of the simplicity of Playwright Test.

In my example I used Jest as a test runner so yarn add --dev jest is required. The last CLI argument - reserved for the browser version - can be retrieved with process.argv.slice(-1)[0] within Node, like this you can tell your tests what browser version you want to use. Here they will be edge, chrome and the default is the bundled chromium.

MS Edge (Chromium)

yarn test chrome.test.js edge

Chrome

yarn test chrome.test.js chrome

Chromium (default - bundled with Playwright) (but any string, or the lack of this argument will also launch this as the default)

yarn test chrome.test.js chromium_default

chrome.test.js
(with Windows-specific executable paths)

const playwright = require('playwright')

let browser
let page

beforeAll(async function () {
  let chromeExecutablePath
  switch (process.argv.slice(-1)[0]) {
    case 'chrome':
      chromeExecutablePath = 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe'
      break
    case 'edge':
      chromeExecutablePath = 'C:\\Program Files (x86)\\Microsoft\\Edge\\Application\\msedge.exe'
      break
    default:
      chromeExecutablePath = ''
  }
  browser = await playwright.chromium.launch({ 
    headless: false, 
    executablePath: chromeExecutablePath 
  })
  page = await browser.newPage()
})

describe('Google Search', function () {
  test('should respond with HTTP 200 - OK', async function () {
    const response = await page.goto('https://google.com')
    const responseCode = response.status()
    expect(responseCode).toBe(200)
  })
  afterAll(async function () {
    await browser.close()
  })
})