Skip to the content.

🎭 Playwright for

Looking for maintainers and see here. Thanks!

PkgGoDev License Go Report Card Build Status Join Slack Coverage Status Chromium version Firefox version WebKit version

API reference Example recipes

Playwright is a Go library to automate Chromium, Firefox and WebKit with a single API. Playwright is built to enable cross-browser web automation that is ever-green, capable, reliable and fast.

Β  Linux macOS Windows
Chromium 123.0.6312.4 βœ… βœ… βœ…
WebKit 17.4 βœ… βœ… βœ…
Firefox 123.0 βœ… βœ… βœ…

Headless execution is supported for all the browsers on all platforms.

Installation

go get -u github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go

Install the browsers and OS dependencies:

go run github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go/cmd/playwright@latest install --with-deps
# Or
go install github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go/cmd/playwright@latest
playwright install --with-deps

Alternatively you can do it inside your program via which downloads the driver and browsers:

err := playwright.Install()

Capabilities

Playwright is built to automate the broad and growing set of web browser capabilities used by Single Page Apps and Progressive Web Apps.

Example

The following example crawls the current top voted items from Hacker News.


package main

import (
	"fmt"
	"log"

	"github.com/playwright-community/playwright-go"
)

func main() {
	pw, err := playwright.Run()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not start playwright: %v", err)
	}
	browser, err := pw.Chromium.Launch()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not launch browser: %v", err)
	}
	page, err := browser.NewPage()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not create page: %v", err)
	}
	if _, err = page.Goto("https://news.ycombinator.com"); err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not goto: %v", err)
	}
	entries, err := page.Locator(".athing").All()
	if err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not get entries: %v", err)
	}
	for i, entry := range entries {
		title, err := entry.Locator("td.title > span > a").TextContent()
		if err != nil {
			log.Fatalf("could not get text content: %v", err)
		}
		fmt.Printf("%d: %s\n", i+1, title)
	}
	if err = browser.Close(); err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not close browser: %v", err)
	}
	if err = pw.Stop(); err != nil {
		log.Fatalf("could not stop Playwright: %v", err)
	}
}

Docker

Refer to the Dockerfile.example to build your own docker image.

More examples

How does it work?

Playwright is a Node.js library which uses:

These patches are based on the original sources of the browsers and don’t modify the browser behaviour so the browsers are basically the same (see here) as you see them in the wild. The support for different programming languages is based on exposing a RPC server in the Node.js land which can be used to allow other languages to use Playwright without implementing all the custom logic:

The bridge between Node.js and the other languages is basically a Node.js runtime combined with Playwright which gets shipped for each of these languages (around 50MB) and then communicates over stdio to send the relevant commands. This will also download the pre-compiled browsers.

Is Playwright for Go ready?

We are ready for your feedback, but we are still covering Playwright Go with the tests.

Resources