playwright-fedora

Run Playwright on Fedora Linux with all 3 browser engines (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit) — fully working, headless and headed.

Playwright officially supports Debian/Ubuntu only. On Fedora, npx playwright install-deps fails and WebKit crashes due to ABI incompatibilities. This project fixes that.

Quick start

# One-liner install (wrappers only)
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CybLow/playwright-fedora/main/install.sh | bash

# Restart your shell, then run full setup
pw setup

# Verify
pw check

Or manually:

git clone https://github.com/CybLow/playwright-fedora.git
cd playwright-fedora
bash setup.sh          # Full setup (system deps + compat libs + browsers + verify)
bash setup.sh --install   # Install pw wrapper to your shell

Upstream PR

Native Fedora support has been submitted upstream: microsoft/playwright#39661. Once merged, npx playwright install-deps and npx playwright install will work natively on Fedora without this project.

Until then, this project provides a standalone solution.

What it does

1. Installs system dependencies via dnf (Chromium, Firefox, WebKit runtime libs including mesa-libGLES, mesa-libEGL, libavif, libatomic, gstreamer, etc.)
2. Downloads Ubuntu 24.04's libjpeg-turbo8 package — Fedora's version exports LIBJPEG_6.2 symbols but Playwright's WebKit needs LIBJPEG_8.0
3. Downloads ICU 74 compat libraries from Ubuntu 24.04 — Fedora ships ICU 75-77+ which are not ABI-compatible with Playwright's WebKit (built on Ubuntu 24.04)
4. Creates libjxl soversion symlinks — Fedora has libjxl.so.0.11, Playwright expects libjxl.so.0.8
5. Patches WebKit MiniBrowser wrappers to load compat libraries (the wrappers overwrite LD_LIBRARY_PATH, ignoring the parent env)
6. Installs shell wrappers (pw command for fish/bash/zsh)

The compat libraries are installed to ~/.local/lib/playwright-compat/ and do not affect system libraries. No compiler toolchain (cmake, gcc, nasm) is required.

Usage

pw test                      # Run Playwright tests
pw test --browser chromium   # Specific browser
pw codegen https://example.com  # Code generator
pw screenshot https://example.com /tmp/shot.png
pw pdf https://example.com /tmp/page.pdf
pw ui                        # Playwright UI mode
pw install                   # Install/update browsers (auto-patches WebKit)
pw check                     # Verify all browsers work
pw <anything>                # Passes through to npx playwright

Important: Always use pw install instead of npx playwright install to ensure WebKit wrappers are automatically patched after browser downloads.

Package manager support

Works with any Node.js package manager:

# npm (default)
npm install -g playwright @playwright/test

# bun
bun install -g playwright @playwright/test

# pnpm
pnpm add -g playwright @playwright/test

After installing Playwright, always run pw install (not npx playwright install) to auto-patch WebKit.

How the WebKit fix works

Playwright ships pre-built browser binaries compiled on Ubuntu 24.04. On Fedora, several libraries are either missing or ABI-incompatible:

libjpeg-turbo (JPEG8 ABI)

WebKit links against libjpeg.so.8 with LIBJPEG_8.0 ELF version symbols (Ubuntu builds libjpeg-turbo with -DWITH_JPEG8=1). Fedora's libjpeg-turbo exports LIBJPEG_6.2 symbols. The soname matches but the version symbol check fails:

/lib64/libjpeg.so.8: version `LIBJPEG_8.0' not found

Fix: Download Ubuntu 24.04's libjpeg-turbo8 package (which provides libjpeg.so.8 with LIBJPEG_8.0 symbols) into ~/.local/lib/playwright-compat/lib64/.

ICU (International Components for Unicode)

Playwright's WebKit links against ICU 74 (libicudata.so.74, libicui18n.so.74, libicuuc.so.74). Fedora 43 ships ICU 77, which is not ABI-compatible (ICU changes symbol names across major versions like ucnv_open_74).

Fix: Download Ubuntu 24.04's libicu74 package and extract the libraries into ~/.local/lib/playwright-compat/icu/.

libjxl (JPEG XL)

Fedora has libjxl.so.0.11, but Playwright expects libjxl.so.0.8.

Fix: Create a symlink from the system library to the expected soname.

WebKit MiniBrowser wrappers

Playwright's WebKit MiniBrowser shell wrappers overwrite LD_LIBRARY_PATH entirely with their own lib directories, ignoring any parent environment:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${MYDIR}/lib:${MYDIR}/sys/lib"

Fix: Patch these wrappers to prepend the compat lib paths:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="${HOME}/.local/lib/playwright-compat/lib64:${HOME}/.local/lib/playwright-compat/icu:${MYDIR}/lib:${MYDIR}/sys/lib"

All compat libraries are scoped to the Playwright process tree only — other applications continue using the system libraries.

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose
PLAYWRIGHT_SKIP_VALIDATE_HOST_REQUIREMENTS	Set to 1 by pw wrapper to skip Playwright's Ubuntu-only dependency checker
PLAYWRIGHT_COMPAT_DIR	Override compat lib location (default: ~/.local/lib/playwright-compat)
PLAYWRIGHT_BROWSERS_PATH	Override browser cache location (default: ~/.cache/ms-playwright)

Supported Fedora versions

Version	Status
Fedora 43	Tested in CI
Fedora 42	Tested in CI
Fedora 41	Tested in CI
Fedora 40	Should work (EOL)
Fedora 39	Should work (EOL)

Docker / CI

docker build -t playwright-fedora .
docker run --rm --shm-size=1g playwright-fedora

The --shm-size=1g flag is required — Chromium crashes with Docker's default 64MB shared memory.

Use ARG FEDORA_VERSION to test specific versions:

docker build --build-arg FEDORA_VERSION=42 -t playwright-fedora:42 .

Tested features (70 pass)

61 browser API tests across Chromium, Firefox, and WebKit:

• Launch headless / headed
• Navigation, title, content
• JavaScript evaluation
• DOM manipulation (fill, click, type)
• Screenshots (PNG buffer, full page, viewport)
• PDF generation (Chromium)
• Multiple pages / tabs
• Context isolation (cookies)
• Network interception (route + fulfill)
• Dynamic content (waitForSelector)
• Locator API (getByRole, getByText)
• Viewport / device emulation
• Geolocation emulation
• Video recording
• File download handling
• Console message capture
• Request/response events
• Local storage
• iframe handling
• Keyboard input
• Trace recording (Chromium)
• HAR recording (Chromium)

9 CLI tests:

• npx playwright --version
• Screenshot (chromium, firefox, webkit)
• Screenshot with viewport / full-page
• PDF generation
• Cache clearing
• Install dry-run

License

MIT