Microsoft today announced the release of the Python version of Playwright, a framework for end-to-end testing of web applications in Python. Playwright is the latest in a slew of Microsoft-created Python tools including the Pylance and Pyright language-support add-ons for Visual Studio Code.
Playwright integrates with the Pytest framework in Python, a widely used automated testing system for Python apps. It provides high-level primitives for accessing elements and behaviors on web pages, so that, for instance, the contents or attributes of elements on a page can be checked. Playwright also integrates with the testing framework in Python’s Django web framework, so that existing Django tests can be extended with front-end tests.
Front-end testing web frameworks has typically been a chore. In Python’s case, one might use a framework like Selenium to automate the interaction of a browser with the web framework and check the results. Playwright simplifies the process: In addition to providing high-level interaction primitives (page.goto(), or page.click()), Playwright intelligently waits for browser activities to complete before performing actions, so the developer doesn’t have to account for that.
Playwright supports interactions under all three major web browser systems (Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit), and device emulation as well. Copies of each web engine come packaged with Playwright, so there is no need to download or install the browsers on the system at large. It’s also possible to emulate web-specific technologies like geolocation, for instance by specifying a latitude and a longitude in a page test. Network traffic can be logged and modified.
Playwright is still in the early stages, but can be installed from the Python Package Index with pip install playwright.