Playwright for Rust

🎭 Rust language bindings for Microsoft Playwright

Status: 🚧 Active Development - Not yet ready for production use

🎯 Why playwright-rust?

Read our WHY.md to understand the vision, timing, and philosophy behind this project.

TL;DR: Rust is emerging as a serious web development language, with frameworks like Axum and Actix gaining traction. AI coding assistants are making Rust accessible to more developers. Test-Driven Development is experiencing a renaissance as the optimal way to work with AI agents. These trends are converging now, and they need production-quality E2E testing. playwright-rust fills that gap by bringing Playwright's industry-leading browser automation to the Rust ecosystem.

Roadmap and Goals

See Development Roadmap for plans and status of the development approach for playwright-rust.

Goal: Build this library to a production-quality state for broad adoption as @playwright/rust or playwright-rs. Provide official-quality Rust bindings for Microsoft Playwright, following the same architecture as playwright-python, playwright-java, and playwright-dotnet.

How It Works

playwright-rust follows Microsoft's proven architecture for language bindings:

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│ playwright-rs (Rust API)                     │
│ - High-level, idiomatic Rust API             │
│ - Async/await with tokio                     │
│ - Type-safe bindings                         │
└─────────────────────┬────────────────────────┘
                      │ JSON-RPC over stdio
┌─────────────────────▼────────────────────────┐
│ Playwright Server (Node.js/TypeScript)       │
│ - Browser automation logic                   │
│ - Cross-browser protocol abstraction         │
│ - Maintained by Microsoft Playwright team    │
└─────────────────────┬────────────────────────┘
                      │ Native protocols
        ┌─────────────┼─────────────┐
        ▼             ▼             ▼
    Chromium      Firefox       WebKit

This means:

• ✅ Full feature parity with Playwright (JS/Python/Java/.NET)
• ✅ Cross-browser support (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit)
• ✅ Automatic updates when Playwright server updates
• ✅ Minimal maintenance - protocols handled by Microsoft's server
• ✅ Production-tested architecture used by millions

API Design Philosophy

Following Playwright's cross-language consistency:

1. Match Playwright API exactly - Same method names, same semantics
2. Idiomatic Rust - Use Result, async/await, builder patterns where appropriate
3. Type safety - Leverage Rust's type system for compile-time safety
4. Auto-waiting - Built-in smart waits like other Playwright implementations
5. Testing-first - Designed for reliable end-to-end testing

Installation

Add to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
playwright-rs = "0.8"  # Auto-updates to latest 0.8.x
tokio = { version = "1", features = ["full"] }

See the CHANGELOG for version history and features.

Development

Prerequisites

• Rust 1.70+
• Node.js 18+ (for Playwright server and browser installation)
• tokio async runtime

Building from Source

# Clone repository
git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/playwright-rust.git
cd playwright-rust

# Install pre-commit hooks
pip install pre-commit
pre-commit install

# Build
cargo build

Installing Browsers

⚠️ IMPORTANT: Browsers are installed automatically after building the project!

When you run cargo build, the build script (build.rs) automatically:

1. Downloads the Playwright driver (version 1.56.1) from Azure CDN
2. Extracts it to the appropriate location based on your setup:
   • Workspace projects: drivers/playwright-1.56.1-<platform>/ in your workspace root
   • Non-workspace projects: Platform-specific cache directory (e.g., ~/.cache/playwright-rust/drivers/ on Linux/macOS)

The build script uses robust workspace detection to find the right location automatically.

After building, install browsers using the downloaded driver's CLI:

# Build the project (downloads Playwright 1.56.1 driver)
cargo build

# Install browsers using the driver's CLI
# macOS/Linux:
drivers/playwright-1.56.1-*/node drivers/playwright-1.56.1-*/package/cli.js install chromium firefox webkit

# Windows:
drivers\playwright-1.56.1-win32_x64\node.exe drivers\playwright-1.56.1-win32_x64\package\cli.js install chromium firefox webkit

Platform-specific examples:

# macOS (arm64):
drivers/playwright-1.56.1-mac-arm64/node drivers/playwright-1.56.1-mac-arm64/package/cli.js install chromium firefox webkit

# macOS (x64):
drivers/playwright-1.56.1-mac/node drivers/playwright-1.56.1-mac/package/cli.js install chromium firefox webkit

# Linux:
drivers/playwright-1.56.1-linux/node drivers/playwright-1.56.1-linux/package/cli.js install chromium firefox webkit

Why this matters:

• Playwright server 1.56.1 expects specific browser builds (chromium-1194, firefox-1495, webkit-2215)
• Using the driver's CLI ensures version compatibility
• The drivers/ directory is gitignored, so each developer/CI environment installs its own

Platform Support:

• ✅ Windows: Full support with CI stability flags enabled (2025-11-09)
• ✅ macOS: Full support
• ✅ Linux: Full support

Note: CI automatically installs the correct browser versions - see .github/workflows/test.yml

Verify installation:

# Browsers are cached in:
# macOS: ~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright/
# Linux: ~/.cache/ms-playwright/
# Windows: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\ms-playwright\

ls ~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright/
# Should show: chromium-1194, chromium_headless_shell-1194, firefox-1495, webkit-2215

Running Tests

Note: This project uses cargo-nextest for faster test execution. Install it once globally:

cargo install cargo-nextest

# All tests (recommended - faster)
cargo nextest run

# All tests (standard cargo)
cargo test

# Integration tests only (requires browsers)
cargo nextest run --test '*'

# Specific test
cargo nextest run test_launch_chromium

# With logging
RUST_LOG=debug cargo nextest run

# Doc-tests (nextest doesn't run these)
# See CLAUDE.md "Documentation Testing Strategy" for details

# Compile-only check (fast, used in pre-commit)
cargo test --doc --workspace

# Execute all ignored doctests (requires browsers, what CI does)
cargo test --doc --workspace -- --ignored

# Execute specific crate's doctests
cargo test --doc -p playwright-rs -- --ignored

Running Examples

Note: See examples/ for usage examples.

# Run a single example
cargo run --package playwright-rs --example basic

# Run all examples
for example in crates/playwright/examples/*.rs; do
    cargo run --package playwright-rs --example $(basename "$example" .rs) || exit 1
done

Contributing

This project aims for production-quality Rust bindings matching Playwright's standards. Contributions should:

• Follow Playwright API conventions
• Include comprehensive tests
• Maintain type safety
• Document public APIs with examples
• Pass CI checks (fmt, clippy, tests)

License

Apache-2.0 (same as Microsoft Playwright)

Acknowledgments

• Microsoft Playwright Team - For the amazing browser automation framework
• playwright-python - API design reference
• Folio Project - Initial driver for development needs