Troubleshooting

Chromium

Chrome headless doesn’t launch on Windows

Some chrome policies might enforce running Chrome/Chromium with certain extensions.

Playwright passes --disable-extensions flag by default and will fail to launch when such policies are active.

To work around this, try running without the flag:

const browser = await playwright.chromium.launch({
  ignoreDefaultArgs: ['--disable-extensions'],
});

Context: Puppetteer#3681.

Chrome headless doesn’t launch on Linux/WSL

Make sure all the necessary dependencies are installed. You can run ldd chrome | grep not on a Linux machine to check which dependencies are missing. For dependencies on Ubuntu, please refer to Dockerfile which is used to run our tests.

The common ones for Debian and CentOS are provided below.

Debian (e.g. Ubuntu) Dependencies

gconf-service
libasound2
libatk1.0-0
libatk-bridge2.0-0
libc6
libcairo2
libcups2
libdbus-1-3
libexpat1
libfontconfig1
libgcc1
libgconf-2-4
libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0
libglib2.0-0
libgtk-3-0
libnspr4
libpango-1.0-0
libpangocairo-1.0-0
libstdc++6
libx11-6
libx11-xcb1
libxcb1
libxcomposite1
libxcursor1
libxdamage1
libxext6
libxfixes3
libxi6
libxrandr2
libxrender1
libxss1
libxtst6
ca-certificates
fonts-liberation
libappindicator1
libnss3
lsb-release
xdg-utils
wget
libgbm1
``` CentOS Dependencies

pango.x86_64 libXcomposite.x86_64 libXcursor.x86_64 libXdamage.x86_64 libXext.x86_64 libXi.x86_64 libXtst.x86_64 cups-libs.x86_64 libXScrnSaver.x86_64 libXrandr.x86_64 GConf2.x86_64 alsa-lib.x86_64 atk.x86_64 gtk3.x86_64 ipa-gothic-fonts xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi xorg-x11-utils xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 xorg-x11-fonts-misc


After installing dependencies you need to update nss library using this command

yum update nss -y ``` Check out discussions

Puppeteer#290 - Debian troubleshooting
Puppeteer#391 - CentOS troubleshooting
Puppeteer#379 - Alpine troubleshooting

Please file new issues in this repo for things relating to Playwright.

Setting Up Chrome Linux Sandbox

In order to protect the host environment from untrusted web content, Chrome uses multiple layers of sandboxing. For this to work properly, the host should be configured first. If there’s no good sandbox for Chrome to use, it will crash with the error No usable sandbox!.

If you absolutely trust the content you open in Chrome, you can launch Chrome with the --no-sandbox argument:

const browser = await playwright.chromium.launch({args: ['--no-sandbox', '--disable-setuid-sandbox']});

NOTE: Running without a sandbox is strongly discouraged. Consider configuring a sandbox instead.

There are 2 ways to configure a sandbox in Chromium.

[recommended] Enable user namespace cloning

User namespace cloning is only supported by modern kernels. Unprivileged user namespaces are generally fine to enable, but in some cases they open up more kernel attack surface for (unsandboxed) non-root processes to elevate to kernel privileges.

sudo sysctl -w kernel.unprivileged_userns_clone=1

[alternative] Setup setuid sandbox

The setuid sandbox comes as a standalone executable and is located next to the Chromium that Playwright downloads. It is fine to re-use the same sandbox executable for different Chromium versions, so the following could be done only once per host environment:

# cd to the downloaded instance
cd <project-dir-path>/node_modules/playwright/.local-browsers/chromium-<revision>/
sudo chown root:root chrome_sandbox
sudo chmod 4755 chrome_sandbox
# copy sandbox executable to a shared location
sudo cp -p chrome_sandbox /usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox
# export CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX env variable
export CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX=/usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox

You might want to export the CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX env variable by default. In this case, add the following to the ~/.bashrc or .zshenv:

export CHROME_DEVEL_SANDBOX=/usr/local/sbin/chrome-devel-sandbox

Firefox

Firefox headless doesn’t launch on Linux/WSL

WebKit

WebKit headless doesn’t launch on Linux/WSL

Code transpilation issues

If you are using a JavaScript transpiler like babel or TypeScript, calling evaluate() with an async function might not work. This is because while playwright uses Function.prototype.toString() to serialize functions while transpilers could be changing the output code in such a way it’s incompatible with playwright.

Some workarounds to this problem would be to instruct the transpiler not to mess up with the code, for example, configure TypeScript to use latest ECMAScript version ("target": "es2018"). Another workaround could be using string templates instead of functions:

await page.evaluate(`(async() => {
   console.log('1');
})()`);

Node requirements

ReferenceError: URL is not defined

Playwright requires Node 10 or higher. Node 8 is not supported, and will cause you to receive this error.

Please file an issue

Playwright is a new project, and we are watching the issues very closely. As we solve common issues, this document will grow to include the common answers.