cli reference

CLI reference

The installed command is invisible-playwright, with a hyphen. python -m invisible_playwright works identically and needs nothing on PATH.

invisible-playwright fetch    # download the engine if missing, check every cached
                              # one against the seal, print the path
invisible-playwright version  # wrapper, core and engine versions, and where the
                              # engine is cached

fetch

Makes the engine present and correct, then prints where it is.

It checks every cached engine tree against the seal shipped inside invisible-core before downloading anything. That ordering is the point: a tree that no longer matches the seal is the case worth catching, and it is invisible to a plain "download if missing" that only looks at whether a file is there. Anything that does not match is reported on stderr and left alone; the sealed engine is fetched and verified against its sha256.

The last line on stdout is the absolute path, by itself, so this is the scripting form:

FIREFOX="$(invisible-playwright fetch)"

which is better than asking for a path separately, because it guarantees the thing it names actually exists and matches the seal.

Running it when everything is already correct is cheap and does nothing.

version

invisible_playwright 0.6.0
invisible_core       18.12.0   (declared: ==18.12.0)
engine               firefox-18  Firefox 151.0  build 20260724001949
seal                 f294a96ae4ec  [.../invisible_core/seal.json]
cache                /home/you/.cache/invisible-playwright

This is the output to paste into a bug report. Two lines are worth knowing about:

• if the installer's record disagrees with the core that will actually run, a STALE RECORD line appears between them. That is the state pip and pip check both call healthy, because both read the record and neither reads the files.
• cache is where the engine trees live. Deleting a directory there is how you reclaim the space; there is no subcommand for it, on purpose - see below.

What happened to the other four

The command line used to have six entries: fetch, fetch --force, path, version, clear-cache, doctor. Each was a step somebody had to know to take, in a package whose whole promise is that the browser handles itself. None of the behaviour was lost:

gone	where it went
doctor	fetch does it on every run. It was the thing most worth doing and the thing least likely to be typed, which is the worst combination a subcommand can have.
fetch --force	unnecessary once every run verifies. A tree is replaced because it does not match the seal, not because a flag was passed.
path	fetch prints it as its last line, and unlike path it guarantees the tree is there and correct.
clear-cache	deliberately not folded in. The cache root belongs to invisible_core, not to this package, so pruning "trees no seal points at" would delete an engine this package did not put there. version prints the location.

The tag argument went with them. The seal decides which engine a given build runs, and the engine check refuses anything else, so a tag on the command line could only ever name something that would then be rejected.

See also

Installation for the initial fetch, and Configuration for the environment variables that change where the engine is cached or which binary gets used.