playwright-trace

A command-line viewer for Playwright trace files, which are recorded histories of browser tests. It can show actions, network requests, console messages, errors, page snapshots, and screenshots without opening a browser.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review test actions, inspect a specific action's logs and snapshots, find requests or errors, and examine the page state at a given point.
Why use it?
It gives developers a way to investigate failed or unexpected tests from the recorded evidence. The trace is opened once, then inspected with focused commands.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/microsoft/playwright/playwright-trace
Any agent
npx skills add microsoft/playwright --skill playwright-trace
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/microsoft/playwright

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,113 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00029 $0.01113
Opus 5 $0.00015 $0.00557
Sonnet 5 $0.00006 $0.00223
Haiku 4.5 $0.00003 $0.00111

Measured 2d ago against content hash 4124dd790915, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

playwright-trace scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

packages/playwright-core/src/tools/skills/playwright-trace/SKILL.md · 175 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 175 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Playwright Trace CLI

Inspect .zip trace files produced by Playwright tests without opening a browser.

Workflow

  1. Start with trace open <trace.zip> to extract the trace and see its metadata.
  2. Use trace actions to see all actions with their action IDs.
  3. Use trace action <action-id> to drill into a specific action — see parameters, logs, source location, and available snapshots.
  4. Use trace requests, trace console, or trace errors for cross-cutting views.
  5. Use trace snapshot <action-id> to get the DOM snapshot, or run a browser command against it.
  6. Use trace close to remove the extracted trace data when done.

All commands after open operate on the currently opened trace — no need to pass the trace file again. Opening a new trace replaces the previous one.

Commands

Open a trace

# Extract trace and show metadata: browser, viewport, duration, action/error counts
npx playwright trace open <trace.zip>

Close a trace

# Remove extracted trace data
npx playwright trace close

Actions

# List all actions as a tree with action IDs and timing
npx playwright trace actions

# Filter by action title (regex, case-insensitive)
npx playwright trace actions --grep "click"

# Only failed actions
npx playwright trace actions --errors-only

Action details

# Show full details for one action: params, result, logs, source, snapshots
npx playwright trace action <action-id>

The action command displays available snapshot phases (before, action, after) and the exact command to extract them.

Requests

# All network requests: start time (on the `trace actions` clock), method, status, URL, duration, size
npx playwright trace requests

# Filter by URL pattern
npx playwright trace requests --grep "api"

# Filter by HTTP method
npx playwright trace requests --method POST

# Only failed requests (status >= 400)
npx playwright trace requests --failed

Request details

# Show full details for one request: headers, body, security
npx playwright trace request <request-id>

Read the full file on GitHub · 175 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 175 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 4124dd790915

Subscribe to this mod's changes

playwright-trace is a skill published in the GitHub repository microsoft/playwright (95,378 stars, last pushed 3d ago), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 1,113 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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