2.15. Playwright Template

The Playwright Template implements the Web Scraping Template’s WebScrapingAsyncPort on top of Playwright, for full browser automation across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit.

It depends on web_scraping (installed automatically) and is combinable with the other engines (selenium, httpx, curl_cffi) — install whichever this project needs side by side. On install, it automatically runs playwright install chromium so a working browser is ready immediately.

2.15.1. Async by nature

Unlike Selenium, Playwright’s Python API is natively asynchronous — this engine implements WebScrapingAsyncPort, not the sync WebScrapingPort. Code that works with an engine polymorphically (not knowing in advance which one it got) needs to check which contract it’s dealing with and await accordingly; see handing off between engines for the pattern used throughout this codebase.

In this project’s own benchmarks, Playwright was consistently around an order of magnitude faster than Selenium for equivalent actions — see the Web Scraping Template page.

2.15.2. Cookies and headers

Playwright’s own APIs handle cookies and headers directly. One notable detail: setting extra HTTP headers replaces the whole header set rather than merging into it, so this adapter always re-applies the full tracked header dictionary on every change — not just the new value.

2.15.3. Using Playwright specifically

This template doesn’t add its own runners — the Web Scraping Template’s docs_search/page_links runners already work once Playwright is installed. To make Playwright the one actually used, either set it as the default (config/web_scraping.toml’s default_interactive_adapter = "playwright") or inject PlaywrightAdapter directly in your own code. See Available runners.