playwright-practices

name	playwright-practices
description	Best practices for Playwright E2E tests. Use when debugging or writing Playwright tests, especially when dealing with global setup or dev servers.

Playwright Best Practices

• Browsers Path: Do not hardcode PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH in package.json scripts. This allows local runs to use default cached browsers and avoid slow installations. It should only be explicitly set in CI environments.
• Global Setup Processes: When spawning a background process from global-setup.ts, use detached: true, stdio: "ignore", and process.unref(). Otherwise, the process may receive SIGPIPE and crash when the globalSetup Node.js process exits.
• WebServer Deadlock: The webServer config starts and polls its url before globalSetup runs. Pointing webServer.url to an endpoint that depends on a backend started in globalSetup will cause a deadlock.