How to install Playwright on my local machine?

Playwright is a framework for automating web browsers through the Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers right from your codebase. It provides a clean, easy-to-use API for writing automated browser tests and scripts.

To install Playwright on your local machine, you'd need to follow these steps:

Step 1: Install Node.js and npm

Playwright requires Node.js to function. If you haven't installed it yet, you can download it from the official Node.js website. This will also install npm, the Node Package Manager, which you will need to install Playwright.

You can verify the installation by opening your terminal and running the following commands:

node -v
npm -v

Step 2: Install the Playwright npm package

Once you have Node.js and npm installed and set up, you can install Playwright by running the following command in your terminal:

npm i playwright

This will install the Playwright API in your project and download browsers to your system.

Step 3: Install browser binaries

If you want to use Playwright with a specific browser, you can install their respective binaries with the following commands:

For Chromium:

npx playwright install chromium

For Firefox:

npx playwright install firefox

For WebKit:

npx playwright install webkit

Step 4: Verify the installation

You can check if Playwright is correctly installed by running a small test script. Here's an example script in Node.js that navigates to a webpage and takes a screenshot:

const playwright = require('playwright');

(async () => {
    const browser = await playwright.chromium.launch();
    const context = await browser.newContext();
    const page = await context.newPage();
    await page.goto('http://example.com');
    await page.screenshot({ path: `example.png` });
    await browser.close();
})();

Save this script in a file, run it with Node.js and if everything is set up correctly, you should see a screenshot of 'http://example.com' in your project's directory.