E2E Setup

Browser installation

If you enabled E2E at scaffold time, the CLI runs pnpm playwright install automatically during project setup. No manual step is required.

To install browsers manually (e.g. after cloning a project that has E2E enabled):

cd my-experiment
pnpm playwright install

This downloads browser binaries for Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit to ~/.cache/ms-playwright. The generated playwright.config.js uses Chromium only (Desktop Chrome device), so you can install just Chromium to save space:

pnpm playwright install chromium

Running tests

pnpm test:e2e

Runs pnpm build first, then all tests in e2e/ against the configured base URL and markets.

Headed mode (for debugging)

pnpm playwright test --headed

Opens a real browser window so you can see the test executing. Useful when a test fails and you need to inspect the page state.

Run a single test file

pnpm playwright test e2e/smoke.spec.js

Direct Playwright commands do not build first. Run pnpm build when the bundle may be stale or missing.

playwright.config.js

The generated configuration:

import { defineConfig, devices } from '@playwright/test';

export default defineConfig({
    testDir: './e2e',
    fullyParallel: true,
    forbidOnly: !!process.env.CI,
    retries: process.env.CI ? 2 : 0,
    reporter: 'html',
    use: {
        ...devices['Desktop Chrome'],
        screenshot: 'only-on-failure',
        trace: 'on-first-retry',
    },
});

Option	Value	Notes
testDir	./e2e	All test files in e2e/
fullyParallel	true	Tests run in parallel
forbidOnly	!!CI	Fails the run if .only() is left in any test
retries	2 in CI, 0 locally	Retries on CI to handle flakiness
reporter	html	Generates playwright-report/index.html
screenshot	only-on-failure	Screenshots saved only when a test fails
trace	on-first-retry	Trace recorded on first retry for debugging

CI usage

Set the CI environment variable to enable CI-specific behaviour (retries, forbidOnly):

CI=true pnpm test:e2e

The HTML report is written to playwright-report/. Generated screenshot helpers attach images to that report.