Browser Automation with playwright-cli

Quick start

# open new browser
playwright-cli open
# navigate to a page
playwright-cli goto https://playwright.dev
# interact with the page using refs from the snapshot
playwright-cli click e15
playwright-cli type "page.click"
playwright-cli press Enter
# take a screenshot (rarely used, as snapshot is more common)
playwright-cli screenshot
# close the browser
playwright-cli close

How interaction refs work

After every command, playwright-cli emits a snapshot file (.playwright-cli/page-*.yml). Element refs (e3, e7, e15) come from that snapshot, read it before the next interactive command. Use playwright-cli snapshot to refresh on demand.

> playwright-cli goto https://example.com
### Page
- Page URL: https://example.com/
- Page Title: Example Domain
### Snapshot
[Snapshot](.playwright-cli/page-2026-02-14T19-22-42-679Z.yml)

If --filename is not provided, a new snapshot file is created with a timestamp. Default to automatic file naming; use --filename= when the artifact is part of the workflow result.

Local installation fallback

If running globally-available playwright-cli fails, prefix with npx:

npx playwright-cli open https://example.com
npx playwright-cli click e1

Browser sessions

Use -s=<name> to run multiple parallel sessions:

playwright-cli -s=mysession open example.com --persistent
playwright-cli -s=mysession click e6
playwright-cli -s=mysession close
playwright-cli list           # list active sessions
playwright-cli close-all      # close every browser

Command reference

Full surface, core, navigation, keyboard, mouse, save-as, tabs, storage (cookies / localStorage / sessionStorage), network, devtools, open parameters, snapshots, browser sessions, end-to-end examples, is in references/commands.md.

Specific tasks

• Request mocking: references/request-mocking.md
• Running Playwright code: references/running-code.md
• Browser session management: references/session-management.md
• Storage state (cookies, localStorage): references/storage-state.md
• Test generation: references/test-generation.md
• Tracing: references/tracing.md
• Video recording: references/video-recording.md