🎭 Playwright Automation Framework

Overview

This test automation framework combines Playwright, pytest, and pytest-bdd to create a comprehensive solution for testing web applications. This project uses as example the Cypress Real World App, a popular open-source project that provides a realistic web application for testing purposes.

Key Features

• Hybrid test strategy — Web UI with pytest-bdd (Gherkin) and API tests with plain pytest
• Page Object Model — Locators, actions, and assertions isolated from step definitions
• Thin BDD steps — Steps only orchestrate; all Playwright logic lives in page objects
• Resilient locators — Prefer get_by_role and get_by_test_id (data-test) (modified playwright configuration)
• Auth state reuse — Login once, persist storage_state under .auth/ for faster scenarios
• Test data seeding — Using class UserBuilder to create users via API
• Test isolation — @reset_db marker reseeds the database after tagged scenarios
• Centralized config — Base URLs and seed users via env vars / config/
• CI/CD pipeline — Optimized with dependency caching
• Reporting — Allure reports published to GitHub Pages; Playwright traces on failure
• BDD skills — Skill to convert specification in natural language into framework-compliant tests
• Flaky retries — By default tests do not rerun. Only scenarios marked @flaky retry up to 2 times with 1s delay
• Parallelization — Tests run in parallel to speed up execution time with python-xdist

Tech Stack

Technology	Purpose
Playwright	E2E test runner and automation library
Requests	API testing and backend test setup
Python	Primary programming language
Gherkin (Cucumber)	BDD syntax for writing test scenarios
Git/GitHub	Version control and project hosting
Github Actions	Continuous integration pipeline
Github Pages	Artifact repository for Alure reports
Pytest	Test runner and orquestation
pytest-bdd	BDD integration with Gherkin scenarios
pytest-playwright	Browser fixtures and Playwright integration for pytest

Allure reports

Allure reports are generated and published in https://codecaballero.github.io/python-playwright/

Installation

Prerequisites

Tool	Version
Python	3.12+
Node.js	22+
Yarn	latest

The app under test must be available at:

• Web: http://localhost:3000
• API: http://localhost:3001

0. Prerequisites

• Python 3.12 or higher
• uv installed

1. Clone this repository

git clone https://github.com/CodeCaballero/python-playwright.git
cd python-playwright

2. Create a virtual environment and install dependencies

uv sync
uv run playwright install chromium
uv run pytest

3. Start the Cypress Real World App

In a separate terminal:

git clone https://github.com/CodeCaballero/cypress-realworld-app.git app
cd app
yarn install --frozen-lockfile
yarn db:seed:dev
yarn dev

Wait until both http://localhost:3000 and http://localhost:3001 respond.

4. Environment variables

Defaults are set in pyproject.toml:

Variable	Default
WEB_BASE_URL	http://localhost:3000
API_BASE_URL	http://localhost:3001

Override them when needed:

WEB_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3000 API_BASE_URL=http://localhost:3001 pytest

5. Run the tests

# Full suite
pytest -v

# API only
pytest test/api/ -v

# Web (BDD) only
pytest test/web/ -v

# With Allure results
pytest -v --alluredir=allure-results
allure serve allure-results

# Playwright traces on failure
pytest test/web/ -v --tracing=retain-on-failure