sbx/playwright-kit repository overview

⁠playwright

A mixin kit that installs the Playwright browser-automation toolchain inside the sandbox: the playwright CLI and @playwright/test v1.61.1 from npm, plus Chromium (and its headless shell) with all required system libraries. Pair it with any agent (Claude, Gemini, …) to let the agent write and run end-to-end tests, scrape or screenshot pages, generate PDFs, and debug web apps served inside the sandbox — all headless, all sandbox-local.

⁠Usage

sbx run claude --kit "docker.io/sbx/playwright-kit:latest" .

Or straight from this repository over git:

sbx run --kit "git+https://github.com/docker/sbx-kits-contrib.git#dir=playwright" claude

Or with a local clone of this repo:

sbx run claude --kit ./playwright/ .

Prerequisites:

• A base image with Node.js ≥ 18 and npm — all standard agent templates ship it. The install fails loudly with a clear message if npm is missing.

Inside the sandbox:

playwright --version                       # CLI on PATH for every user
npx playwright test                        # run a project's test suite
npx playwright screenshot http://localhost:3000 page.png

Driving a browser from code works with the globally installed library or a project-local one:

const { chromium } = require('playwright');
const browser = await chromium.launch();     // headless; finds browsers via PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH

⁠How it works

⁠Why browsers live in /opt/ms-playwright

Kit install hooks run as root, but the agent runs as uid 1000. Playwright's default browser location is per-user (~/.cache/ms-playwright), so a root-time install would strand the browsers in /root/.cache where the agent can't use them. The kit sets PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH=/opt/ms-playwright as a container-wide environment variable and installs there — the same approach as the official Playwright Docker image. The directory is left world-writable (also matching the official image) so the agent user can fetch additional browser builds at runtime when a project pins a different Playwright version.

⁠Why NODE_PATH is set

Node resolves require('@playwright/test') by walking node_modules up from the requiring file, so a bare smoke.spec.js in an empty directory can't see the globally installed packages — npx playwright test finds the runner but the test file fails to import. Setting NODE_PATH to the global npm root (/usr/local/share/npm-global/lib/node_modules, the standard agent templates' prefix) adds it as a resolution fallback, making zero-config test runs work. Projects with their own node_modules are unaffected: the local copy always wins, and on a template with a different npm prefix the path simply doesn't exist and Node skips it. Note environment.variables is last-wins across kits — a kit composed after this one that also sets NODE_PATH overrides this value.

⁠Why Chromium only

Each browser engine is a 100–150 MB download plus its own set of apt-installed system libraries. Chromium covers the overwhelming majority of agent tasks (testing, scraping, screenshots, PDFs), keeps sandbox creation fast, and keeps the system-library footprint small. Firefox and WebKit binaries can be fetched at runtime (npx playwright install firefox webkit — the CDN domains are allowed), but their extra system libraries are not installed; fork the kit and extend the second install command if you need cross-engine runs out of the box.

⁠Why headless only

The sandbox has no display server, so --headed, --ui mode, and codegen won't work. Everything else — screenshots, PDFs, videos, traces — works headless, and Playwright's default headless Chromium shell is what CI systems run anyway.

⁠Why the version is pinned

Kits are cached in user workflows and re-run on every sandbox creation, so a floating latest would make sandbox builds non-reproducible. The kit pins [email protected] and @playwright/[email protected]; npm verifies the downloaded tarballs against the sha512 integrity values in the registry metadata, so pinning the version pins the content. Browser builds are keyed to the Playwright version, so they're transitively pinned too. To bump: change PLAYWRIGHT_VERSION in spec.yaml and the version references in agentInstructions and this README.

⁠Why these domains

permissions.network.allow is the kit's complete outbound contract — CI runs e2e under a deny-all policy.

Runtime reminder: the allowlist covers installing and running Playwright itself, not the sites a test visits. Servers on localhost inside the sandbox always work; navigating to external sites fails with a proxy error unless the user's sandbox policy allows those domains.

⁠Cleanup

Everything is sandbox-local: npm packages, browsers in /opt/ms-playwright, and apt-installed libraries all disappear with the sandbox (sbx rm <name>). Nothing touches the host's browsers, caches, or displays.