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Recording video

Playwright allows us to record the browser screen during automation. https://playwright.dev/docs/videos

With this awesome feature, NO NEED to keep our attention focused on the screen during the automation :)

require 'tmpdir'

playwright.chromium.launch do |browser|
  Dir.mktmpdir do |tmp|
    video_path = nil

    browser.new_context(record_video_dir: tmp) do |context|
      page = context.new_page
      # play with page

      # NOTE: Page#video is available **only when browser context is alive.**
      video_path = page.video.path
    end

    # NOTE: video is completely saved **only after browser context is closed.**
    handle_video_as_you_like(video_path)
  end

Specify where to put videos​

Playwright puts videos on the directory specified at record_video_dir.

The previous example uses Dir#mktmpdir for storing videos into a temprary directory. Also we simply specify a relative or absolute path like ./my_videos/ or /path/to/videos.

Getting video path and recorded video​

This is really confusing for beginners, but in Playwright

  • We can get the video path only when page is alive (before calling BrowserContext#close or Page#close)
  • We can acquire the completely saved video only after calling BrowserContext#close

So in most case, we have to store the video path in advance, and handle the saved video after BrowserContext is closed, as is shown the previous example code.

Using video#save_as(path)​

If you want to just save video to somewhere without handling the video using File.open, you can simply use video#save_as(path_to_save).

require 'tmpdir'

playwright.chromium.launch do |browser|
  Dir.mktmpdir do |tmp|
    page = nil

    browser.new_context(record_video_dir: tmp) do |context|
      page = context.new_page
      # play with page
    end

    # NOTE: video is completely saved **only after browser context is closed.**
    page.video.save_as('my-important-video.webm')
  end

Using screen recording from Capybara driver​

capybara-playwright-driver exposes a function to store the video.

Capybara.current_session.driver.on_save_screenrecord do |video_path|
  # Handling recorded video here.
  # video_path is like '/var/folders/xx/xxxxxxxxxx_xxxxxxxx/T/xxxxxxx-xxxxx-xxxxxxxx/e6bde41c5d05b2a02344b058bf1bfea2.webm'
end

With this callback registration, we can record the videos without specifying record_video_dir explicitly or preparing a temporary directory. capybara-playwright-driver automatically prepare and set record_video_dir internally.