[Feature] Browser testing support for external playwright server

[daniel100097]

Hi, I’m currently trying to run Pest v4 together with browser testing.

I’m using Docker and the PHP-FPM container from Docker Hub. I’d rather not install Node.js in there, and Microsoft already provides a Docker image for Playwright.

Is there a feature where I can just provide the WebSocket URL in order to skip all the Playwright checks?

  playwright:
    image: mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1.57.0-noble
    container_name: playwright-server
    ports:
      - "9222:9222"
    shm_size: "2gb"
    command: ["npx", "playwright", "run-server", "--host", "0.0.0.0", "--port", "9222", "--mode", "launchServer"]

[Magnesium38]

Chiming in to say that docker support would be fantastic for my company as well. We were evaluating browser testing today and installing Playwright in CI was causing us major headaches that resulted in the decision to skip browser testing for now. I saw this issue earlier today and dug into what sort of changes would be required. I did manage to get it running locally with manual tweaks, so it's possible.

Here's the list of changes that I made:

First, I hardcoded my ip here. Grabbed from hostname -I | awk '{print $1}'. I was having some docker connectivity issues around using 127.0.0.1 with WSL.
https://github.com/pestphp/pest-plugin-browser/blob/615fbf02014d12e35aca42997910952e292e2134/src/Drivers/LaravelHttpServer.php#L204

-return sprintf('http://%s:%d', $this->host, $this->port);
+return sprintf('http://%s:%d', '172.26.207.224', $this->port);

Next, again I couldn't just listen to 127.0.0.1, I had to use 0.0.0.0 in some places. Changing the ServerManager.php
https://github.com/pestphp/pest-plugin-browser/blob/615fbf02014d12e35aca42997910952e292e2134/src/ServerManager.php#L27

-public const string DEFAULT_HOST = '127.0.0.1';
+public const string DEFAULT_HOST = '0.0.0.0';

Lastly, the biggest change was in PlaywrightNpmServer.php. I just hijacked everything that was existing in that file and rewrote it to point at docker. Minimally, all that needed to change was the url() implementation, but I did clear the rest out so I wasn't needlessly starting a node playwright server as well.

https://github.com/pestphp/pest-plugin-browser/blob/615fbf02014d12e35aca42997910952e292e2134/src/Playwright/Servers/PlaywrightNpmServer.php#L121-L135

-if (! $this->isRunning()) {
-    throw new RuntimeException(
-        sprintf('The process with arguments [%s] is not running or has stopped unexpectedly.', json_encode([
-            'baseDirectory' => $this->baseDirectory,
-            'command' => $this->command,
-            'host' => $this->host,
-            'port' => $this->port,
-            'until' => $this->until,
-        ]),
-        ));
-}
-
-return sprintf('%s:%d', $this->host, $this->port);
+return '127.0.0.1:3000';

With those changes in, I was able to talk to a docker container that I had manually booted up with docker run -p 3000:3000 --rm --init -it mcr.microsoft.com/playwright:v1.54.1-noble npx -y playwright@1.54.1 run-server --port 3000 --host 0.0.0.0.

Obviously, there'd need to be more changes to get that into an actionable PR, but it wasn't impossible. The biggest hurdles I see would be the network communicating between the container and the HTTP server and then making it configurable. Neither seems impossible so I'm hopeful that this feature could land sometime soon.

[hafezdivandari]

pestphp/pest-plugin-browser#131