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Advanced installation


Managing browser binaries

Each version of Playwright needs specific versions of browser binaries to operate. By default Playwright downloads Chromium, WebKit and Firefox browsers into the OS-specific cache folders:

  • %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\ms-playwright on Windows
  • ~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright on MacOS
  • ~/.cache/ms-playwright on Linux
npm i -D playwright

These browsers will take few hundreds of megabytes of the disk space when installed:

du -hs ./Library/Caches/ms-playwright/*
281M  chromium-XXXXXX
187M  firefox-XXXX
180M  webkit-XXXX

You can override default behavior using environment variables. When installing Playwright, ask it to download browsers into a specific location:

$ PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=$HOME/pw-browsers npm i -D playwright

When running Playwright scripts, ask it to search for browsers in a shared location:

$ PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=$HOME/pw-browsers node playwright-script.js

Or you can opt into the hermetic install and place binaries under the node_modules/ folder:

$ PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=0 node playwright-script.js

Playwright keeps track of packages that need those browsers and will garbage collect them as you update Playwright to the newer versions.


NOTE Developers can opt-in in this mode via exporting PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=$HOME/pw-browsers in their .bashrc.


Download from artifact repository

By default, Playwright downloads browsers from Microsoft and Google public CDNs.

Sometimes companies maintain an internal artifact repository to host browser binaries. In this case, Playwright can be configured to download from a custom location using the PLAYWRIGHT_DOWNLOAD_HOST env variable.

$ PLAYWRIGHT_DOWNLOAD_HOST=192.168.1.78 npm i -D playwright

Skip browser downloads

In certain cases, it is desired to avoid browser downloads altogether because browser binaries are managed separately.

This can be done by setting PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD variable before installation.

$ PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_BROWSER_DOWNLOAD=1 npm i -D playwright

Download single browser binary

Playwright ships three packages that bundle only a single browser:

NOTE All configuration environment variables also apply to these packages.

Using these packages is as easy as using a regular Playwright:

Install a specific package

$ npm i -D playwright-webkit

Require package

// Notice a proper package name in require
const { webkit } = require('playwright-webkit');

(async () => {
  const browser = await webkit.launch();
  // ....
})();