playwright-cli

name	playwright-cli
description	Automate browser interactions from the shell using Playwright via the `playwright-cli` command (open/goto/snapshot/click/type/screenshot, tabs/storage/network). Use when you need deterministic browser automation for web testing, form filling, screenshots/PDFs, or data extraction.

Browser Automation With playwright-cli

This system provides playwright-cli via Nix (see nixos/flake.nix for the nixpkgs PR patch and nixos/code.nix for installation), so it’s available on PATH without any npm -g installs.

Quick Start

# First run (downloads browser bits used by Playwright)
playwright-cli install-browser

# Open a new browser session (optionally with a URL)
playwright-cli open
playwright-cli open https://example.com/

# Navigate, inspect, and interact
playwright-cli goto https://playwright.dev
playwright-cli snapshot
playwright-cli click e15
playwright-cli type "search query"
playwright-cli press Enter

# Save artifacts
playwright-cli screenshot --filename=page.png
playwright-cli pdf --filename=page.pdf

# Close the browser
playwright-cli close

Practical Workflow

1. playwright-cli open (or open <url>)
2. playwright-cli snapshot
3. Use element refs (e1, e2, ...) from the snapshot with click, fill, hover, check, etc.
4. Take screenshot/pdf as needed
5. playwright-cli close

Tips

• Use playwright-cli state-save auth.json / state-load auth.json to persist login state across runs.
• Use named sessions with -s=mysession when you need multiple concurrent browsers.
• Set PLAYWRIGHT_CLI_PACKAGE to pin the npm package (default is @playwright/cli@latest).