microsoft / playwright-cli

playwright-cli is Microsoft's CLI-first companion to Playwright MCP, built specifically for coding agents working under a limited context budget. Instead of a tool-call protocol that loads a full accessibility-tree snapshot on every step, an agent runs discrete commands — open, goto, click, type, fill, drag, screenshot, pdf, tracing-start, video-start, and dozens more — against a persistent browser process, and only pulls a page snapshot when it explicitly asks for one. Install is npm install -g @playwright/cli@latest, then playwright-cli install --skills; a session's cookies and storage persist while its browser process stays alive, or to disk if you pass --persistent, and named sessions (-s=name) can run side by side. A playwright-cli show dashboard gives a live grid or per-session view of whatever an agent is doing in the background, with manual takeover of mouse and keyboard.

It's for a coding agent already deep in a large codebase, where Playwright MCP's richer, stateful introspection isn't worth its token cost on every browser step. Microsoft's own README draws that line explicitly and still recommends Playwright MCP instead for exploratory automation, self-healing tests, or long-running agentic loops that benefit from holding page structure in context across many steps — this package is the other half of that trade-off, not a wholesale replacement for it.

READ THE FULL ANALYSIS＋

The second skill, dev, isn't for you. It documents "rolling dependencies, releasing, or other repo maintenance tasks" for playwright-cli's own maintainers — useful to someone opening a pull request against this repository, not to someone using the CLI to test their own site.

Checked 19 September 2026. We read the README's command reference in full but did not run the CLI against a live browser ourselves.