Reliable UI, API, and Visual Tests from Your First Script to CI

Read before you buy: the PDF here is a free sample — the first 20 pages of the 477-page book (payments, sales and reviews on this demo site are sample data). Get the full e-book at thenexbooks on Gumroad.

Write end-to-end tests that are fast, readable, and fail only for real reasons.

End-to-end tests answer the question every team asks before a release: can a real user still sign in, find a product, and pay for it? For years those tests had a reputation for being slow, brittle, and impossible to debug. Playwright was designed to fix that at the root, with auto-waiting, retrying assertions, isolated browser contexts, parallel runs, and a trace viewer that replays every failure step by step.

This book teaches Playwright Test with TypeScript from the very first command to a complete, maintainable suite running in continuous integration. You test one realistic application from start to finish, and each feature appears at the moment it solves a problem you actually have, so you learn how to design reliable tests for your own applications, not just which methods exist.

What's inside

• What end-to-end tests are for, how Playwright's design removes the usual sources of flakiness, and a fair comparison with other tools
• Installing Playwright, the config file, the test runner, workers, fixtures, and reading every part of the output
• Locators that find elements the way users do (roles, labels, text, test ids), strict mode, filtering, and chaining
• Actions and auto-waiting, web-first assertions, soft assertions, polling, and custom matchers
• Forms and validation, native and HTML dialogs, new tabs, iframes, file uploads, and downloads
• Codegen, UI mode, the VS Code extension, and habits that help you write tests faster
• Suite architecture: hooks, tags, annotations, storage state and setup projects, page objects, custom fixtures, and test data that stays isolated under parallel runs
• API testing with the request fixture, hybrid API and UI tests, network interception and mocking, and HAR replay
• Visual regression testing with screenshot baselines, masking, and thresholds
• Accessibility checks with roles and ARIA snapshots, controlling time with the clock API, and device, locale, and color-scheme emulation
• Debugging with the trace viewer and Inspector, a practical guide to diagnosing and curing flaky tests, parallelism, sharding, and cross-browser and mobile projects
• Reporters, GitHub Actions workflows (including sharded runs with merged reports), Docker, other CI systems, and a test strategy that scales

One running example, start to finish. You test Fernway Shop, a fictional online plant store with customer, admin, and locked accounts, a searchable catalog, a cart with coupons and shipping rules, a validated checkout, order history, an admin dashboard with a modal dialog, CSV upload and download, a help page with an embedded chat frame, dark mode, and a JSON REST API. The store is a small Node.js app with no dependencies, included as a companion download, so you can run every example yourself. Every test result in the book was produced by running the tests against it.

Current and honest. The book uses Playwright 1.63 with TypeScript and Node.js 22, and notes where features are recent. It contains no invented benchmarks or statistics. Every chapter includes runnable code, Tips, Notes, Warnings, exercises, and Key Takeaways, and the appendices give you a cheat sheet, copy-ready templates with a full reference for the demo app, a production checklist, and a glossary.

Format: PDF, 477 pages (A4), linked table of contents and bookmarks, plus fernway-shop.zip (the companion demo store app). English. First Edition, 2026. Published by thenexbooks. This book is independent and is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Microsoft or the Playwright project.

Table of Contents

Part I — Foundations

• Ch 1 · Why End-to-End Testing and Why Playwright
• Ch 2 · Setting Up: Installing Playwright and Running Your First Test
• Ch 3 · Anatomy of a Test: test, expect, Fixtures, and the Runner
• Ch 4 · Locators: Finding Elements the Way Users Do
• Ch 5 · Actions and Auto-Waiting: Interacting Reliably

Part II — Writing Reliable Tests

• Ch 6 · Web-First Assertions: Checking What Users See
• Ch 7 · Forms and Validation: Testing Login and Checkout
• Ch 8 · Navigation, Dialogs, New Tabs, and Frames
• Ch 9 · Files: Uploads, Downloads, and the Admin Dashboard
• Ch 10 · Codegen, UI Mode, and Writing Tests Faster

Part III — Test Architecture

• Ch 11 · Organizing a Test Suite: Files, Hooks, Tags, and Annotations
• Ch 12 · Authentication: Storage State, Setup Projects, and Roles
• Ch 13 · Page Object Models That Stay Maintainable
• Ch 14 · Custom Fixtures: Sharing Setup the Playwright Way
• Ch 15 · Test Data: Seeding, Resetting, and Isolation

Part IV — API, Network, and Visual Testing

• Ch 16 · API Testing with the request Fixture
• Ch 17 · Hybrid Tests: Fast Setup Through the API
• Ch 18 · Network Interception and Mocking
• Ch 19 · Visual Regression Testing with Screenshots
• Ch 20 · Accessibility, Time, and Emulation

Part V — Debugging and Scale

• Ch 21 · Debugging Failures: Trace Viewer, Inspector, and Logs
• Ch 22 · Flaky Tests: Causes, Diagnosis, and Cures
• Ch 23 · Parallelism, Sharding, and Speed
• Ch 24 · Cross-Browser and Mobile Testing with Projects

Part VI — CI and Production

• Ch 25 · Reporters and Test Results
• Ch 26 · Running Playwright in CI: GitHub Actions, Docker, and Other Pipelines
• Ch 27 · Test Strategy at Scale: What to Automate and What Not To
• Ch 28 · Case Study: The Complete Fernway Test Suite

Appendices
A · Playwright Cheat Sheet
B · Templates and Reference
C · Production Checklist
D · Glossary

Book details