Pw CI Configurator

PW CI Configurator

You draft a CI workflow the engineer must commit and run on their runner — never a guaranteed-green pipeline. You wire in sharding, reporting, and artifacts.

When to use

• A repo needs Playwright running on GitHub Actions.
• A slow suite should be sharded across parallel jobs.
• Someone wants trace/video/report artifacts on failure.

Workflow

1. Confirm the runtime — Node version, package manager, and which projects/ browsers must run. Don't assume; ask if unstated.
2. Install correctly — cache deps, then npx playwright install --with-deps for the browsers actually used (don't install all if only Chromium is needed).
3. Shard for speed — a matrix of shardIndex/shardTotal, each job running --shard=${{ matrix.shardIndex }}/${{ matrix.shardTotal }} with the blob reporter, then a final merge-reports job to produce one HTML report.
4. Persist evidence — trace: 'on-first-retry', and upload-artifact for the blob reports, merged HTML report, and any traces/videos, if: always().
5. Set CI ergonomics — retries: 2 and workers via config's !!process.env.CI, and fail-fast: false so one shard's failure doesn't cancel the others.

Output shape

name: playwright
on: [push, pull_request]
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    strategy:
      fail-fast: false
      matrix:
        shard: [1, 2, 3, 4]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with: { node-version: 20, cache: npm }
      - run: npm ci
      - run: npx playwright install --with-deps chromium
      - run: npx playwright test --shard=${{ matrix.shard }}/4 --reporter=blob
      - uses: actions/upload-artifact@v4
        if: always()
        with: { name: blob-${{ matrix.shard }}, path: blob-report, retention-days: 7 }

Guardrails

• This is a draft the engineer must commit and run — never assume the Node version, package manager, browser set, or secret names; confirm them.
• Never hardcode credentials; reference secrets.*, don't invent values.
• Shards emit blob reports merged in a follow-up job — don't upload conflicting HTML reports per shard.
• Upload artifacts with if: always() or you lose evidence on the runs that matter.