Testing your web app with Playwright

Once upon a time, if you wanted a truly modern web frontend experience for your Python web app you would have limited options in how to pull it off. A lot of people would reach for heavy frontend tools and frameworks such as React, Vue or one of their many, many competitors. And those tools generally have their recommendations around testing.

Things are shifting a bit - tools like HTMX and AlpineJS are taking Python Web dev by storm and simplifying the creation of modern frontends. A Python web app can now take on the full responsibility of producing a modern frontend. So it would be good to test them in Python as well.

This is where Playwright comes in. It promises to enable reliable end-to-end testing for modern web apps. And it has Python bindings. *swoon*

In this talk, I'll give you a little tour of Playwright and how to use it in your app. I'll demo some workflows, patterns, tips, and tricks.

About Sheena O'Connell

I am currently the CTO of Umuzi, a non-profit training provider based in South Africa. I work on creating effective and efficient remote education systems for tech education. This includes a whole lot of things - Software engineering, process engineering, UX, management, and a whole lot more.

My personal mission is to level up people who teach code - I have a lot of niche skills in that domain, but most importantly, I think it is a very high-leverage way to help people.

Python is my love language.