What is playwright-trace?

A command-line workflow for inspecting Playwright trace files, which are recordings of browser-test actions and results. It can show actions, requests, console output, errors, page snapshots, and screenshots without opening a browser.

Use it to open trace archives, list actions, inspect individual actions, review network requests and errors, and examine captured page evidence.

It helps find why a browser test failed by examining its recorded steps and page state after the test has run.

playwright-trace — Skill for Codex by PracticalSwan/agent-skills

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.

Any agent

npx skills add PracticalSwan/agent-skills --skill playwright-trace

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/PracticalSwan/agent-skills

Made for: Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/playwright-trace/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/playwright-trace)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/playwright-trace"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/playwright-trace/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/playwright-trace"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/practicalswan/agent-skills/playwright-trace.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 29 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,954 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00029	$0.01954
Opus 5.5	$0.00012	$0.00782
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00006	$0.00391
Haiku 4.5	$0.00003	$0.00195

Measured 1mo ago against content hash 03d7e3536b3c, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, 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 1mo 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.

playwright-trace/SKILL.md · 247 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 247 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. This is a file-analysis workflow, distinct from the live-browser playwright-cli tracing-start/tracing-stop commands.

Prerequisites and entrypoint

Trace-file commands are provided by the project's playwright package, not by the global @playwright/cli binary. Confirm the project dependency first:

npm ls --depth=0 playwright @playwright/test

Then prefer the local executable without an implicit network fetch:

npx --no-install playwright trace open test-results/my-test/trace.zip

If the project does not provide playwright, ask for approval before adding @playwright/test or playwright; do not make a global test-runner install a side effect of loading this skill. The global CLI can still record a live trace with playwright-cli tracing-start and playwright-cli tracing-stop, but it does not expose the playwright trace file-inspection command.

Workflow

Start with trace open <trace.zip> to extract the trace and see its metadata.
Use trace actions to see all actions with their action IDs.
Use trace action <action-id> to drill into a specific action — see parameters, logs, source location, and available snapshots.
Use trace requests, trace console, or trace errors for cross-cutting views.
Use trace snapshot <action-id> to get the DOM snapshot, or run a browser command against it.
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 --no-install playwright trace open <trace.zip>

Close a trace

# Remove extracted trace data
npx --no-install playwright trace close

Actions

# List all actions as a tree with action IDs and timing
npx --no-install playwright trace actions

# Filter by action title (regex, case-insensitive)
npx --no-install playwright trace actions --grep "click"

# Only failed actions
npx --no-install playwright trace actions --errors-only

Read the full file on GitHub · 247 lines

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

1mo ago First seen · 247 lines · 29 tokens per session scan A 03d7e3536b3c

Subscribe to this mod's changes

playwright-trace is a skill published in the GitHub repository PracticalSwan/agent-skills (21 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 29 tokens to every session and 1,954 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5.5. 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 2026-09-13.

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