STARTER_CHARACTER = 🎭

playwright-cli

Driving a browser from the shell. Each command prints the executed Playwright code, the page state, and a fresh snapshot.

The loop

Snapshot to see the page, act on an element by its ref, snapshot again.

playwright-cli snapshot          # accessibility tree with [ref=e8] handles
playwright-cli click e8          # act on a ref
playwright-cli snapshot          # confirm the result

Refs are not stable. Any DOM change renumbers them — re-snapshot before acting on a page that just changed. Acting on a stale ref hits the wrong element or none.

For a large page, snapshot a region instead of the whole tree: snapshot e34 or snapshot --depth=4.