Advanced installation

• on Windows
• ~/Library/Caches/ms-playwright on MacOS
• ~/.cache/ms-playwright on Linux

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

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:

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

$ PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=0 node playwright-script.js

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

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

Playwright ships three packages that bundle only a single browser:

• playwright-chromium

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

// Notice a proper package name in require
const { webkit } = require('playwright-webkit');
(async () => {
  const browser = await webkit.launch();
})();