Configuring Playwright with Specific Chrome Executable

Configuring Playwright with Specific Chrome Executable | Generated by AI

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Got it. You want to configure Playwright on Windows so that it launches a specific Chrome executable with certain launch options (like headless: true) directly in your playwright.config.js.

Here’s how you can do it:

1. Use `executablePath` in your Playwright config

By default, Playwright uses its bundled Chromium, but if you want Google Chrome (your own installation), you must tell Playwright where the chrome.exe file is located.

Example playwright.config.js:

// playwright.config.js
import { defineConfig, devices } from '@playwright/test';
import path from 'path';

export default defineConfig({
  projects: [
    {
      name: 'Google Chrome',
      use: {
        browserName: 'chromium',
        // On Windows, provide the full path to chrome.exe
        channel: undefined, // make sure channel is unset, since we'll use executablePath
        executablePath: 'C:\\Program Files\\Google\\Chrome\\Application\\chrome.exe',
        headless: true,  // run in headless mode
        args: [
          '--disable-gpu',
          '--no-sandbox',
          '--disable-dev-shm-usage',
        ],
      },
    },
  ],
});

2. Notes

On Windows, the usual Chrome path is:
- C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
- or C:\Program Files (x86)\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe
Make sure to escape backslashes (\\) in JS strings.
Use headless: true to enforce headless mode.
You can also pass any Chromium CLI flags in args.

3. Run the config

You can now run tests with:

npx playwright test --project="Google Chrome"

✅ This will launch your specific Chrome executable with headless mode and the given arguments.

Do you also want me to show you how to conditionally switch between bundled Playwright Chromium and your installed chrome.exe (e.g. for CI vs local dev)?

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