[Feature]: create-playwright --browsers option

[karlhorky]

🚀 Feature Request

Allow for specifying installPlaywrightBrowsers non-interactively with create-playwright, eg:

$ pnpm create playwright --browsers
# This will install Playwright browsers and skip the following question:
# ? Install Playwright browsers (can be done manually via `pnpm exec playwright install`)? ›

Example

See above

Motivation

Currently it's not possible to pass a true value for installPlaywrightBrowsers alone, without specifying other options

The closest thing is the --quiet option (see below, from the options list):

Usage: npx create-playwright@latest [options] [rootDir]
    Available options are:
      ...
      --quiet: do not ask for interactive input prompts

However, this also sets other options at the same time, and disables any interactive prompts, both of which may be undesirable side effects.

Implementation

A prerequisite to enable the behavior of skipping prompts when options are passed in:

• [Feature]: create-playwright: --quiet by default if all required CLI flags passed #29894

Related

• [Feature]: create-playwright --test-dir option #29891
• [Feature]: create-playwright: --quiet by default if all required CLI flags passed #29894

[karlhorky]

Workaround

It seems like there's an undocumented environment variable TEST_OPTIONS which can be set to a JSON string:

  private async _askQuestions(): Promise<PromptOptions> {
    if (process.env.TEST_OPTIONS)
      return JSON.parse(process.env.TEST_OPTIONS);

So probably this can be used to pass installPlaywrightBrowsers and all other options (on non-Windows, in a less ergonomic way):

TEST_OPTIONS='{"installGitHubActions": true, "language": "TypeScript", "installPlaywrightDependencies": true, "testDir": "playwright", "installPlaywrightBrowsers": true}' pnpm create playwright

[mxschmitt]

What is your use-case for it? TEST_OPTIONS is only for internal tests so its an undocumented option which is subject for change.

[karlhorky]

What is your use-case for it?

I want to be able to run the pnpm create playwright command non-interactively, with options already specified, without it asking me questions.

This is for our lectures and cheatsheets teaching beginners to create and write end to end tests. (also the motivation for all of the other feature requests I added at #29891 #29894 #29896)

[mxschmitt]

Is this for some kind of workshop I assume? Sounds like a GitHub template/boilerplate repository would fit better there instead of increasing the scope of the API for create-playwright. This also reduces the risk of failure in the future, when we e.g. change the way create-playwright works, change the output, introduce a new major API version etc.

[karlhorky]

@mxschmitt they are programming courses including web development bootcamps (our teaching style is to use tools and the options they provide, not provide some preconfigured starter). But I think maybe that is putting too much emphasis on the courses / teaching aspect anyway.

It's not only about the use case of the bootcamps and other courses we provide - I would also just personally expect this as a CLI user who has experienced many UX flows with different CLIs:

1. Options should be able to be passed via CLI flags
2. Options passed via CLI flags make it so that the interactive questions disappear

I think this is a pretty common pattern and helps users to experience less surprise with CLI behavior.

All of these feature requests could probably fit into a PR of about 20-30 lines, and most of the functionality that these features require are already built in the existing setup of the CLI. In my opinion, I don't think this introduces new complexity or maintenance burden.

[mxschmitt]

You can do the following as of today, would that work for you? npm init playwright -- --quiet --browser=chromium --browser=firefox my-test-project

[karlhorky]

What I mean to suggest is a flag to non-interactively mirror the functionality of answering "Yes" (true) to this question (this question / feature is currently only available in an interactive TTY prompt):

? Install Playwright browsers (can be done manually via `pnpm exec playwright install`)? ›

(accepting the default browsers, without having to answer Yes to this question)

As a user, I would want to "just use the default browsers Playwright installs when answering yes", not have to remember a list of different browsers to keep in my flags list.

[mxschmitt]

Ah I see, so --browsers is confusing, it should be --install-browsers not --browser which is for selecting which browser to use. Feel free to create a PR for it.

[karlhorky]

Ah I see, so --browsers is confusing, it should be --install-browsers not --browser which is for selecting which browser to use

I agree the name I proposed above is confusing - I proposed it for API symmetry / consistency / discoverability with the --no-browsers flag. (also a common UX pattern in CLIs)

Maybe to maintain this symmetry, the new PR could also add a new alias for --no-browsers called --no-install-browsers

So after the PR, we would have:

• --no-browsers and --no-install-browsers (aliases)
• --install-browsers

We could also consider dropping the --no-browsers flag, but that would be a breaking change

@mxschmitt thoughts on this proposal to maintain the symmetry?

Alternatively, I would also support achieving the symmetry by keeping my original proposal of --browsers (even though it's a confusing name).

[karlhorky]

The more I think about it, the more I think it's better to maintain the symmetry using my original name proposal --browsers (so that it's discoverable for users that they can run --no-browsers and --browsers)

[karlhorky]

@mxschmitt I opened a PR with a demo of my suggested approach, including:

1. a demo of the --browsers flag
2. a consolidation of the options to avoid the string literal union type and the help message from getting out of sync
3. a check to make sure that both of a boolean options pair are not passed

• feat: --browsers option for default browsers create-playwright#119

This PR depends on another smaller PR, in which I return 0 as a status code from the --help option:

• fix: exit with return code 0, exit early with --help create-playwright#118