How to Use Playwright with Next.js - A Step-By-Step Guide

Greetings from the Playwright universe! You've come to the right spot if you're searching for a robust, dependable, and developer-friendly platform to manage end-to-end (E2E) testing.

Microsoft created Playwright, a cutting-edge testing framework for end-to-end (E2E) testing. It is designed to provide quick, dependable, and adaptable testing for web applications and supports a variety of browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and WebKit (Safari).

Why Playwright?

For each test, Playwright builds a separate browser context, guaranteeing independence without lag. To increase speed without compromising test isolation, it saves authentication states to avoid repeated logins.

The playwright eliminates the need to use arbitrary timeouts by using web-first assertions and auto-wait for components. To troubleshoot more quickly while testing, set up retries and take screenshots, videos, and traces.

Playwright integrates seamlessly with your tech stack thanks to its support for TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, .NET, and Java. Playwright is a great option for automating user interactions for UI testing.

Setting Up a Next.js Project

We will start by setting up a Next.js project using the Next.js Launchpad of our company, CreoWis. This Launchpad gives you the necessary tools, customizations, and best practices to optimize your development process with a hassle-free, pre-configured setup for Next.js applications. This configuration makes it easier to start a project and lets you concentrate on constructing instead of configuring.

Read more details about what this Launchpad provides here.

Create Project Folder:

Create a new folder for the project, here we will use PlaywrightNext as the project name.

mkdir PlaywrightNext
cd PlaywrightNext

Initialize Next.js with CreoWis Launchpad:

Next, use the CreoWis Launchpad template to set up your Next.js project or you can also use the standard npx create-next-app@latest command to create a new Next.js project.

npx create-next-app -e https://github.com/CreoWis/next-js-launchpad

Now we are all set to start with Playwright testing to make sure your app runs smoothly, we'll go ahead and use Playwright for end-to-end testing.

Playwright Setup

Let’s get started with installing Playwright, you can do so by using npm, yarn, or pnpm.