playwright

name	playwright
description	Browser automation via Playwright CLI — screenshots, scraping JS-rendered pages, PDF generation, link extraction. Runs directly via Bash (no MCP server, no token overhead).

Playwright Browser Automation

Run node tools/playwright.js directly via Bash. All commands output JSON. No MCP server required.

Prerequisites (run once per machine)

npm install

Uses your system Chrome or Edge — no separate browser download needed. Falls back to Playwright's bundled Chromium automatically if neither is found (e.g. CI).

Decision: Which Tool to Use

Need	Tool
Screenshot any URL	node tools/playwright.js screenshot
Scrape JS-rendered page	node tools/playwright.js scrape
Generate PDF from URL	node tools/playwright.js pdf
Extract all page links	node tools/playwright.js links
Quick one-off screenshot (no install)	npx playwright screenshot <url> <file>
Large-scale scraping (1000+ pages)	Apify MCP
Static HTML / REST API content	Tavily MCP or curl
localhost screenshots (frontend dev)	node screenshot.mjs (see frontend-instructions.md)

Commands

screenshot

node tools/playwright.js screenshot <url> [output-path] [--fullpage] [--headed] [--wait-for <selector>] [--timeout <ms>]

• Default output: .tmp/screenshot.png
• --fullpage — capture full scrollable page, not just viewport
• --wait-for — wait for a CSS selector to appear before capturing

node tools/playwright.js screenshot https://example.com .tmp/example.png
node tools/playwright.js screenshot https://example.com .tmp/full.png --fullpage
node tools/playwright.js screenshot https://app.example.com .tmp/app.png --wait-for "#dashboard"

scrape

node tools/playwright.js scrape <url> [--selector <css>] [--headed] [--wait-for <selector>] [--timeout <ms>]

• Without --selector: returns { title, url, text, metaDescription } for the whole page
• With --selector: returns array of { text, html, href } per matched element

# Full page text
node tools/playwright.js scrape https://example.com

# Specific elements
node tools/playwright.js scrape https://example.com --selector "h2"
node tools/playwright.js scrape https://store.example.com --selector ".product-name" --wait-for ".product-name"

pdf

node tools/playwright.js pdf <url> [output-path] [--format <A4|Letter>] [--headed] [--timeout <ms>]

• Default output: .tmp/output.pdf

node tools/playwright.js pdf https://example.com .tmp/report.pdf
node tools/playwright.js pdf https://example.com .tmp/report.pdf --format Letter

links

node tools/playwright.js links <url> [--headed] [--timeout <ms>]

Returns array of { text, href } for all external links on the page.

node tools/playwright.js links https://example.com

Output Handling

All commands write JSON to stdout. Save or inspect:

# Save to file
node tools/playwright.js scrape https://example.com > .tmp/data.json

# Pretty-print
node tools/playwright.js scrape https://example.com | python -m json.tool

Screenshots: after saving, use the Read tool to visually inspect the PNG.

Quick CLI (no npm install needed)

npx playwright screenshot https://example.com .tmp/screenshot.png
npx playwright screenshot --full-page https://example.com .tmp/full.png
npx playwright pdf https://example.com .tmp/output.pdf

Error Handling

Error	Fix
Cannot find module 'playwright'	Run npm install
Executable doesn't exist (after fallback)	Run npx playwright install chromium (CI / no system Chrome)
net::ERR_NAME_NOT_RESOLVED	URL typo or site is down
Timeout	Increase --timeout 60000 or add --wait-for

WAT Integration

For multi-step automation tasks, follow workflows/browser-automation.md.