chore: automatically detect the dev server

[pavelfeldman]

No description provided.

[github-actions]

Test results for "tests 1"

1 failed
❌ [installation tests] › playwright-component-testing.spec.ts:21:5 › pnpm: @playwright/experimental-ct-react should work

2 flaky

⚠️ [chromium] › library/tracing.spec.ts:243:5 › should not include trace resources from the previous chunks
⚠️ [chromium] › library/tracing.spec.ts:243:5 › should not include trace resources from the previous chunks

21360 passed, 581 skipped
✔️✔️✔️

Merge workflow run.

[Pharb]

Sadly the switch from GET -> HEAD can be a breaking change (i.e. not all servers support HEAD requests).

A note in the release notes would have been nice, or an automatic fallback to GET in case of pw:webserver HTTP Status: 405.

[CreativeTechGuy]

@Pharb you just beat me to it. 😛 This took a while for us to figure out why our tests were failing to start and it wasn't until I added logs for all requests on our server that I realized this stealthily changed from GET to HEAD.

It was definitely breaking for us. We use a plain NodeJS server in development which we added a API route which only responds to GET requests specifically to use in Playwright to check if it's online. It's an easy fix to let it respond to HEAD requests too, but would have been really nice to know this was needed.

[JakeHedman]

Same, this broke all our tests since we rely on the GET requests to check if our test data is ready etc. Adding special HEAD handlers in our webserver just for tests doesn't make much sense to me.

If it's super important to change this (and without a config option), should this not have been a major release since it's a breaking change?

[Pharb]

I opened #29732 to track it as a regression in v1.42.0