Use Playwright for integration testing

[knyghty]

Code of Conduct

• I agree to follow Django's Code of Conduct

Feature Description

Replace Selenium with Playwright.

Problem

Most people seem to hate writing Selenium tests. People seem to hate a bit less writing Playwright tests.

While there would be a good deal of churn involved I think this would be a net positive for maintenance.

Request or proposal

proposal

Additional Details

I've been using Playwright at work for some time and it seems to work quite well, especially compared with Selenium. If you use it correctly, which is not too difficult, it seems to be much less flaky than Selenium and new issues never seem to appear when upgrading.

Implementation Suggestions

I think the process would go something like:

• Add Playwright to the test suite and migrate one test to it (or write a new one)
• Require new tests be written using Playwright (we can consider if this applies to already-open PRs or not)
• Incrementally rewrite existing tests using Playwright
• Turn off Selenium

[github-actions]

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[nessita]

I like this proposal, with the caveat that I'd want to see a concrete implementation plan: ideally with a more aggressive approach to migrating the existing tests.

Personally, I wouldn’t be in favor of officially adopting Playwright in Django without a clear commitment to fully migrate all Selenium-based tests within a single feature release cycle. The migration can happen across multiple PRs, but the changes should land in main as a cohesive unit as much as possible.

Having two end-to-end testing frameworks long-term feels like a recipe for fragmentation, added maintenance cost, and contributor confusion. A clean switch minimizes churn, simplifies the developer experience, and makes CI easier to reason about.

[tim-schilling]

Would the Axe integration for accessibility testing be a problem here? I believe the selenium library is fairly well maintained, first by Mozilla, now Django. The playwright version is a wrapper around the JS file.

[knyghty]

believe the selenium library is fairly well maintained, first by Mozilla, now Django

Yep if we do this we went through a lot of work for nothing :)

But not really by Django, just most people maintaining are also us. But yeah we need to think about how this would work, ideally in advance, though it's not like we have Axe integrated yet.

The playwright version is a wrapper around the JS file.

It's not much different from the Selenium version in that regard, if I understand your meaning.