playwright-cli

playwright-cli

Playwright CLI with SKILLS

Playwright CLI vs Playwright MCP

This package provides CLI interface into Playwright. If you are using coding agents, that is the best fit.

• CLI: Modern coding agents increasingly favor CLI–based workflows exposed as SKILLs over MCP because CLI invocations are more token-efficient: they avoid loading large tool schemas and verbose accessibility trees into the model context, allowing agents to act through concise, purpose-built commands. This makes CLI + SKILLs better suited for high-throughput coding agents that must balance browser automation with large codebases, tests, and reasoning within limited context windows.

• MCP: MCP remains relevant for specialized agentic loops that benefit from persistent state, rich introspection, and iterative reasoning over page structure, such as exploratory automation, self-healing tests, or long-running autonomous workflows where maintaining continuous browser context outweighs token cost concerns. Learn more about Playwright MCP.

Key Features

• Token-efficient. Does not force page data into LLM.

Requirements

• Node.js 18 or newer
• Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or any other coding agent.

Getting Started

Installation

npm install -g @playwright/cli@latest
playwright-cli --help

Installing skills

Claude Code, GitHub Copilot and others will use the locally installed skills.

playwright-cli install --skills

Skills-less operation

Point your agent at the CLI and let it cook. It'll read the skill off playwright-cli --help on its own:

Test the "add todo" flow on https://demo.playwright.dev/todomvc using playwright-cli.
Check playwright-cli --help for available commands.

Demo

> Use playwright skills to test https://demo.playwright.dev/todomvc/.
  Take screenshots for all successful and failing scenarios. 

Your agent will be running commands, but it does not mean you can't play with it manually:

playwright-cli open https://demo.playwright.dev/todomvc/ --headed
playwright-cli type "Buy groceries"
playwright-cli press Enter
playwright-cli type "Water flowers"
playwright-cli press Enter
playwright-cli check e21
playwright-cli check e35
playwright-cli screenshot

Headed operation

Playwright CLI is headless by default. If you'd like to see the browser, pass --headed to open:

playwright-cli open https://playwright.dev --headed

Sessions

Playwright CLI keeps the browser profile in memory by default. Your cookies and storage state are preserved between CLI calls within the session, but lost when the browser closes. Use --persistent to save the profile to disk for persistence across browser restarts.

You can use different instances of the browser for different projects with sessions. Pass -s= to the invocation to talk to a specific browser.

playwright-cli open https://playwright.dev
playwright-cli -s=example open https://example.com --persistent
playwright-cli list

You can run your coding agent with the PLAYWRIGHT_CLI_SESSION environment variable:

PLAYWRIGHT_CLI_SESSION=todo-app claude .

Or instruct it to prepend -s= to the calls.

Manage your sessions as follows:

playwright-cli list                     # list all sessions
playwright-cli close-all                # close all browsers
playwright-cli kill-all                 # forcefully kill all browser processes

Monitoring

Use playwright-cli show to open a visual dashboard that lets you see and control all running browser sessions. This is useful when your coding agents are running browser automation in the background and you want to observe their progress or step in to help.

playwright-cli show

The dashboard opens a window with two views:

• Session grid — shows all active sessions grouped by workspace, each with a live screencast preview, session name, current URL, and page title. Click any session to zoom in.
• Session detail — shows a live view of the selected session with a tab bar, navigation controls (back, forward, reload, address bar), and full remote control. Click into the viewport to take over mouse and keyboard input; press Escape to release.

From the grid you can also close running sessions or delete data for inactive ones.

Commands

Core