Failure diagnostics

When an example managed by playwright-page fails, the lifecycle captures a screenshot of the page before the context is closed, so you can see what the browser looked like at the point of failure. The capture never throws, so a diagnostic problem cannot turn a passing example into a failing one.

Artifacts directory

Screenshots are written to an artifacts directory, playwright-artifacts by default. Override it per describe or for the whole run:

describe 'checkout', {
  playwright-page(fixture => 'specs/fixtures/checkout.html', artifacts => 'tmp/shots');
  # ...
}

The environment variable PLAYWRIGHT_ARTIFACTS sets the default for every example. An explicit artifacts => ... argument takes precedence.

Each failure writes failure-<pid>-<n>.png, unique per worker process and example, so parallel workers do not collide.

Traces

A Playwright trace can be dumped alongside the screenshot, gated so it stays off by default. Enable it with trace => True or the PLAYWRIGHT_TRACE environment variable:

playwright-page(fixture => 'specs/fixtures/checkout.html', trace => True);

When tracing is on, each example records a trace; on failure the trace is written as failure-<pid>-<n>.zip next to the screenshot, and on success it is discarded. Open a trace with npx playwright show-trace <file>.zip.